Historic Apartment Building Scanned

As-Built Facade of Towers Apartments in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Our as-built documentation of the Towers Apartments in the Las Olas district of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Built in 1925, the renovating architect will be repartitioning the units according to existing window locations.

These stills are transparent wireframes from our final deliverable: one as-built Revit file. They are based on our laser scan data gathered on-site along with data from an existing topographical survey.

Our scope included full exterior and interior common areas with MEP. No individual residential units were scanned. For more examples of our as-built documentation work, visit http://c2a.studio/bim

Entire 3-story structure with topographical survey data.

Top-down roof view of Towers Apartments.

Interior staircase exposed due to the unscanned interior units.

Exterior MEP on north facade of structure.

Column and soffit details with exterior elevator shaft.

PBX telephone system in the lobby.

1929 Bas-Relief Sign Preserved

If you strolled along Miami Beach's Lincoln Road in 1929, you'd stumble upon the Cadillac Salon. This was a luxury automobile dealership launched right at the beginning of the Great Depression. They were super exclusive and wanted you to feel that way when you walked into their showroom on the southeast corner of Lincoln Road and Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Miami Beach Cadillac Salon as featured in the Miami Herald on opening day, January 24, 1930.

By 1942, government agencies bought the building and the dealership was history. For the next five decades, the original façade's bas-relief and zigzag ornamentation were completely covered until renovators rediscovered them. While scanning a nearby project, our 360° lasers captured some details of the dealership's historic bas-relief sign showing airplanes, cars, the LaSalle and Fleetwood brands along with a giant logo.

An ad from the Miami News on April 8, 1932.

Since our Revit team had some downtime over the past few weeks, we decided to draft a quick as-built 3d model to show how easy it is to safeguard architectural heritage. The city of Miami Beach has a lot of this hidden art and it would be a shame to lose it.

The effort to accurately laser scan historic façades is far less than the cost of potentially losing them. Scanning not only allows you to capture accurate measurements, create shop drawings and elevations but you can also 3d print details in concrete, stone and many other materials.

Virtually visit the site at https://bit.ly/34LzhOD and you can read more about architect Carlos B. Schoeppl's design at https://bit.ly/3bk4efm

Miami Beach Motel Renovation

Are you a MiMo fan? Take a quick tour through our laser scans of a post-war modern architectural specimen on Miami Beach. Designed by Melvin Grossman, the Carnival Motel opened in 1956. It was the kind of place you might book a few weeks, lounging with a cigarette and martini while listening to some new guy Elvis Presley (with 3 singles in the top 10 that year).

Later renamed the International Inn, the property has been kept mostly intact. Even the two lobby phone booths still have the original air blowers so you can keep smoking while you dial Senator McCarthy's hotline. The lobby's original terrazzo floors and forged handrail are still intact, as is the 25' wall of windows.

Our final deliverable was a 3d Revit model which allows the architect and other stakeholders to plan, redesign and approve with actual measurements. With historic properties, it's not unusual to have slopes in floors or other deviations that are undetected by conventional methods of measurement. The science in our laser scans help make the case for surgical fixes while maintaining historic integrity.

"The science in our laser scans help make the case for surgical fixes while maintaining historic integrity."

The last part of the video shows a quick solar visualization. With survey control points, we geolocated the structure and set the time to 6:55am on August 1st. By the end of the clip 12 hours later, we can see what the late afternoon light does through the sloping 25' wall of windows.

In the Miami Beach hospitality industry, sunshine is just as important as drinks and food. Luckily for this client, there has been very little adjacent multi-story development so the sunlight continues to fall unchanged for the past 64 years.

See more of our projects here >>> http://c2a.studio/bim