Chicago reality capture
In Chicago, the facade on a tall building is not optional to document. It is the law.
Chicago's facade ordinance, adopted in 1996, requires critical exterior-wall examinations of every building eighty feet or taller, on cycles of four, eight, or twelve years depending on the cladding, with signed reports due to the city. The stock those rules cover is enormous: early-1900s terra-cotta and masonry high-rises whose ornamented walls have been shedding and cracking for a century. Add a deep industrial and warehouse belt around the city and you have a metro where exterior walls, historic detail, and old structures all have to be documented accurately. A laser scan records the whole wall, not just the lines a rope drop happens to reach.
Why scan a facade the ordinance already gets inspected?
A visual and hands-on examination signs off the ordinance requirement, and that stays the accepted method. What a rope drop or a swing stage cannot do is show the whole wall at once. A localized bulge, a section leaning out, or a plane that has drifted over decades is easy to miss between the lines an inspector reaches. A laser scan captures the entire elevation as a point cloud, and our wall plumbness analysis turns it into a full-facade record of where the wall leans out of plumb and by how much. That gives the engineer a measured baseline, the owner a record between cycles, and the repair team a scope grounded in the whole wall rather than a set of spot checks.
The same capture supports the building overall. Our building and interior scanning documents conditions inside and out for the repair design and the owner's records.
Terra-cotta was made to be replaced piece by piece.
The ornamented terra-cotta and masonry facades that define Chicago's early towers are built from thousands of individual units, and restoring one means matching profiles that no drawing records. A high-resolution scan captures the exact geometry of a cornice, a medallion, or a damaged unit, so a replacement can be modeled and cast to fit. Our historic preservation scanning documents the terra-cotta and masonry in full, both to guide the restoration and to preserve a record of what the building looked like before the work.
From the capture, the same point cloud feeds a coordinated scan-to-BIM model when the project extends past the facade into a broader renovation.
How we serve the Chicago metro.
We do not keep an office in Chicago. We serve the metro through a nationwide network of vetted reality-capture technicians, and we produce and stand behind the deliverable ourselves. Whether the work is a facade under the ordinance, a terra-cotta restoration, or a warehouse in the industrial belt, you deal with one team on scope, scheduling, and the model that comes back.
Published prices.
| Deliverable | Price |
|---|---|
| Half-day scan (capture) | $1,500 to $2,300 to start |
| Full-day scan (capture) | $3,500 to $4,100 to start |
| Modeling from the scan | $0.10 / sq ft ($500 min) |
Capture is the scan itself. Modeling is priced by the square footage you want built. Facade and plumbness reporting is scoped to the wall, so tell us the building and the deliverable and we quote it directly.
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Tell us about the Chicago building.
Send us the building, the wall or the square footage, and the deliverable you need. We scan it, build the record, and hand you something you can act on or hold on to.
Get a quoteQuestions about a project? Reach us at info@scanningandmodeling.com or (772) 210-4584.