21 Jul Project Update: 800 N Collington

    One of the projects I am tackling with the Historic American Building Survey office is the documentation of a classic row-housing block in Baltimore. This housing typology is typical all throughout Baltimore, first appearing in the late 1800s. Our team had the luxury of choosing the 800 block off of N Collington located in the outskirts of the downtown area. We chose this block specifically because it is one of the few structures that is still intact and has it has also preserved the integrity of its original design. Unfortunately much of the city’s new developments are implementing a contemporary take on architecture, and sometimes this comes at the price of demolishing whole housing blocks such as the one we are documenting. Luckily there is an awareness for these classic structures from local organizations, such as John Hopkins Foundation who is funding the project. One of the very first steps of documentation is fieldwork. For HABS this term encompasses hand-measurements, hand-drawn profiles, photography, and laser scans. Our first site visits were solely comprised of laser scanning the building. This was accomplished through a laser machine setup at specific positions surrounding the building. The various scans are then combined in a program named Cyclone to create a 3-dimensional model. In addition, panorama photographs are taken at each position which are used to color the model with the buildings true colors. These models are shown in the pictures that follow: The “point-cloud” model that is generated from these scans has a high degree of accuracy. So in essence, once we have the model we can begin producing all the required drawings for the documentation of the building.  For the past week or so I have been working on the front building elevation. So far, a majority of my time has been spent drawing the intricacies of brick and stone. Here is a portion of my drawing:   Stay tuned! On my next blog post I will discuss another project that I and fellow LHIP intern Naomi Doddington are tackling together.