At the intersection of strict budgetary demands, the need for preserving local history we find a very unique project – employing very unique solutions to meet its needs.
We set our scene at the Arizona State Fairgrounds Grandstand Building, a building in jeopardy of being torn down. In order to save the immense building, constructed as part of the New Deal, from the threat of a wrecking ball, a dedicated team of innovative people came up with a revolutionary use of BIM and other tools to spearhead the preservation project. Part of the effort to save it includes creating accurate as-built HABS (Historic American Building Survey) drawings to support fund-raising and preservation efforts. These HABS drawings will also be lodged with the United States Library of Congress.
In a manner that definitely qualifies as pushing the envelope Philip Allsopp and his team at Smart Pad Living, and ToPa3D captured an as-built model of the Arizona State Fairgrounds Grandstand Building in record time.
How did they achieve this? They combined the power of drones, 3D laser scanning, and point clouds with ARCHICAD 19 to recreate high quality drawings of the Arizona State Fairgrounds Grandstand Building, an important, historic structure built of concrete, steel, and some adobe as part of the 1938 WPA project.
Allsopp, Senior Sustainability Scientist and Adjunct Professor and his team took on the challenge: to produce set of HABS (Historic American Building Survey) drawings for the Library of Congress for the Arizona State Fairgrounds Grandstand Building, a 1938 WPA project. Using traditional methods, the surveying of the grandstand building alone would have taken months and cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars. The grassroots team behind the project had neither that kind of time or money to spend.
Equipped with a full multi-dimensional modeling system by GRAPHISOFT, his team revolutionized and condensed the entire surveying process. In a matter of days, using drones, laser scanners and BIM – the team gathered and processed billions of data points.
Though the tools themselves could never be categorized as simple, the use of them together on this project simplified the task, making it possible for it to be completed from an economic standpoint.
This use of BIM also highlights how traditional surveying methods come with some level of inefficiency and inaccuracy. The data points collected by using the drones and laser scanning method produced an accuracy level +-2mm.
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