3D Scanning in San Jose, CA

San Jose was founded as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe in November 1777 and hosted California's first state legislature, and its downtown still holds buildings from most of the years since. The Peralta Adobe on San Pedro Square, built in 1797, is the oldest building in the city and San Jose Historic Landmark No. 1. The Bank of Italy Building, finished in 1926, is the oldest skyscraper downtown. The Hotel De Anza on West Santa Clara Street, a 1931 Art Deco building, has been on the National Register since 1982. Buildings like these have been renovated, re-tenanted, and seismically upgraded more than once, and the drawings on file rarely show all of it. A scan records the facades, floors, stairs, and structure as they stand in one visit, so the architect and engineer design against measured conditions.

The city's transit corridors are the other big source of work. VTA's BART Silicon Valley Phase II will run six miles from Berryessa through downtown to Santa Clara, mostly in a five-mile tunnel bored as a single 45-foot-wide tube with one track stacked above the other, with stations at 28th Street/Little Portugal, Downtown San José, Diridon, and Santa Clara. The latest schedule puts service in 2036. Caltrain, meanwhile, has run electric trains between San Francisco and Tamien Station since August 2024. Owners of buildings along a corridor like that often want a dated, control-tied record of their structure before heavy construction comes close, and a repeat scan on the same control shows whether anything changed. In North San Jose and along the older industrial streets, concrete R&D and warehouse buildings change tenants often, and a scan gives the next tenant's design team clear heights, column grids, and a slab deviation map before layout starts.

Contour Survey is based in Lotus, in El Dorado County, and has worked across the Bay Area for years. We set primary GNSS control, carry secondary control with a Trimble S3 total station, and tie every Trimble X9 setup to it. Processing is in Trimble Business Center, in US survey feet, with control held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. You get a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, coded points, and a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, our San Jose floor level surveys, scanning in Santa Clara, and our San Jose surveying page.