Rooftop Racetrack: 1928 via Retronaut
“The Lingotto building, Turin, Italy, once housed a Fiat factory. Built between 1916 and 1923, the design had five floors, raw materials going in at the ground floor, and cars built on a line that went up through the building. Finished cars emerged at rooftop level, where there was a rooftop test track. It was the largest car factory in the world at the time. Le Corbusier called it “one of the most impressive sights in industry”, and “a guideline for town planning”.”
Impressive
Precise Images of Buildings That 3D Scanning Enables by Scott Page Design
3D scanning—though it’s been around since the 1960s—has been in the news of late, with Harvard using the technology to recreate ancient statues and MakerBot announcing a desktop scanner last month. But cheaper, faster, and more accessible 3D scanners aren’t just revolutionizing how we print terrifying models of our own faces. They’re also changing how we understand the city.
A fascinating story about urban-scale 3D scanning published on the Atlantic Cities this week explores how a Bay Area architect named Scott Page is using a 3D scanner to generate super-accurate models of historic and dilapidated buildings.
Page’s system takes a series of photographs and patches them together based on how light bounces off each surface. Rather than taking weeks to survey an old building, architects can now generate precise dimensions in just a few hours. Because the scanner uses color photographs, the models are also incredibly beautiful, expressive documents—Page compares them to the first photographs ever made. “There is a magical quality to point cloud imagery, similar to the earliest photos that froze time onto small metallic plates,” he writes on his website.
Amazing
Source: ryanpanos
