Laser Scanning at Fallingwater

Over the past few months, Origin 4 Design has continued its efforts documenting Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.  We have also presented our efforts at our September workshop and at UPenn's SMARTdoc heritage conference in November.  We would now like to take the time and share images of the heritage documentation process with you...

In earlier posts we shared the process of documenting the exterior of the world famous house on the waterfall.  Our efforts illustrate the effectiveness of laser scanning to caputre fine details and the potential change in structure and landform.  The image below is of a raw point cloud (the data as it is collected in the field).  The smaller inset image shows how effective the point cloud is in accurate measurement.  Highly accurate measurements are important in tracking change over the lifetime of a histric cultural resource.

Origin 4 Design recently began scanning the interior.  Our process involves careful planning utilitzing available floorplans to strategize best locations for efficient data capture.  Fallingwater's many angles presents a unique challenge in efforts to capture both structure and interior furnishings. 

 

These images are raw point clouds from the main room of Fallingwater.  Notice the detail captured in structure & furnishing.  Also, points are generated through the glass windows, capturing data from the surrounding tree and shrub canopy. 

The image to the right illustrates a composite of our interior scans from the main room.  Again, this composite is raw point cloud data, highly accurate, and imbedded with 3D spatial information.  Every point cloud we capture has this data. 

Our next steps are to continue laser scanning the interior while generating composites of each room.  We are working on rendering the model to create a rich, virtual experience aside from the technical  requirements for precise historic resource documentation.