Buildings whose drawings were never right, or never existed.
Measured documentation of historic and adaptive-reuse buildings — irregular geometry, hand-built millwork, additions nobody recorded. Captured without touching the fabric.
Why these are the hardest buildings to measure
Nothing is square. Walls taper. Floors slope. The 1962 addition was drawn on a napkin. A tape measure and a clipboard produce a set of numbers that disagree with each other, and the disagreements surface during construction.
LiDAR does not care whether a wall is plumb. It records what is there, and the point cloud remains available when someone asks a question the drawings do not answer.
Where it gets used
- Tax credit and grant applications requiring documented existing conditions
- Adaptive reuse feasibility and design
- Condition assessment and a dated baseline before intervention
- Ornamental detail and millwork profiles recorded before repair or removal
- Insurance valuation on irreplaceable fabric
Historic and irregular-geometry work carries a +75% complexity multiplier on base capture. From $4,375 in practice.
Is the capture non-contact?
Entirely. Nothing is touched, mounted or attached. We work from a tripod.
Can you document ornamental detail?
The capture records profile and geometry. For decorative detail we pair it with close-range photography — say so in the scope.
Do you meet documentation standards for grant applications?
We produce measured drawings and a dated point cloud. Whether a specific program accepts them is a question for the program officer — send us the requirements, and we will tell you honestly whether we can meet them.
Buildings whose geometry does not cooperate
Historic structures are hard to document for a reason that has nothing to do with their age: nothing in them is orthogonal. Walls are not parallel, corners are not square, floors are not level, and openings are not consistent. A measurement method that assumes right angles produces a drawing that is subtly wrong everywhere, and the error compounds across a building.
Laser measurement does not assume anything. It records the wall where the wall is. That is why irregular geometry carries a published 75% complexity uplift rather than being quietly declined — the capture takes longer, the drafting takes considerably longer, and pretending otherwise produces either a bad drawing or a bad invoice.
Where the money and the deadlines come from
- Historic rehabilitation tax credit applications, which require documentation of the existing condition before work begins — and the "before" cannot be recreated once the scaffolding is up.
- Grant-funded preservation projects, which run to a spend deadline and generally require condition documentation as a reporting deliverable.
- Adaptive reuse, where an architect is designing new systems into a structure whose actual dimensions nobody has ever recorded.
- Disaster and loss documentation on a listed structure, where the pre-loss condition is the entire argument.
Non-contact matters more here
Capture touches nothing. No targets adhered to historic fabric, no ladders against plaster, no equipment resting on anything. The tripod sits on the floor and the instrument measures from where it stands. For fragile interiors, deteriorated finishes or anything a conservator has an opinion about, that is not a convenience — it is the condition of being allowed in the building at all.
This is not a HABS/HAER documentation package. Formal HABS documentation has its own standards — large-format archival photography to specific film and processing requirements, measured drawings to a defined convention, and a written historical report by a qualified historian. We produce accurate measured drawings and a walkthrough that can support such a package, and we work alongside the historian and the architectural photographer who produce the rest. If somebody tells you they deliver a complete HABS set out of a 3D camera, check their references.
What does it cost?
Most projects land between $8,000 and $40,000. The 75% irregular-geometry uplift applies to the base, which is why a 6,000 ft² historic building costs more than a 6,000 ft² office. It is published on the pricing page and built into the calculator.
Can you match a specific drawing convention?
Yes. Tell us the standard — a SHPO's format, an architect's office standard, a grant's reporting requirement — at scoping and we draft to it. A remap after delivery is quoted separately, so it is cheaper to say so first.
How accurate is it against a hand-measured survey?
About one centimeter on wall distances, and considerably more consistent, because a hand survey of an irregular building accumulates error at every measurement and a laser capture does not. More on accuracy and standards here.
What we actually deliver here
The services this work is usually scoped as: as-built drawings, scan to BIM and point cloud scanning. Everything comes off one capture of the building, and all of it is priced publicly — you can price your own project without talking to us first.
Related: museums and exhibits.