The Philip Merrill Environmental Center is home of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, situated on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay north of Highland Beach. The building began experiencing structural derogation and issues with the structural support system that spanned the building. Made of wooden planks and structural anchor components, the complicated system of structural supports with a natural finish underwent many undocumented changes during construction. These undocumented changes required updated as-built drawings to be prepared for the structural engineer’s evaluation. However, many if not most of the structural anchor components were in aerial positions that made providing accurate measurements nearly impossible due to time and cost constraints.
For the 3D scanning at Philip Merrill Environmental Center, christopher utilized terrestrial surveying techniques to map the boundary and relief around the site. For the structure, christopher’s field staff spent close to a week during the heart of the winter to map each anchor bolt plate, every bolt and edges of each structural wood plank to an accuracy-acceptable for design and construction of as-built drawings. Collecting over 120 GB worth of point cloud data saved the project almost six months of development of drawings for design purposes and ultimately found the problem in the construction that contributed to the derogation.
