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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.
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.
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




Some of our architect clients have a 2D workflow. But, they still benefit from 3D efficiency. For this historic Florida home, we used one set of 3D/360° laser scans to draft seven as-built 2D Autocad files


4 Elevations

2 Floor Plans

1 Roof Plan


Here's a short video showing all of the above:


See more of what we can do at http://c2a.studio/bim Our laser scans enable us to reverse engineer blueprints, CAD files and 3d models from any built structure with up to ±3mm accuracy.



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

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