Matt Jarosz, Trust Advisor and Director of UW-Milwaukee’s Historic Preservation Institute is using low-cost scans to preserve buildings before demolition.
Excerpt - Full article on MilwaukeeMag.com | When are historical building faces potential demolition, everybody’s up in arms. Preservationists are pitted against developers. Tension is high, and so are the stakes: once the buildings are bulldozed, it’s gone for good.
Matt Jarosz, director of UW Milwaukee’s Historic Preservation Institute, recently introduced a cutting-edge method to preserve these buildings’ memories, as a sort of compromise. Why not laser scan the exterior of a building as a new archival process? “A lot of groups are upset when a commission allows a demolition, but in some cases it has to happen,” Jarosz says. “The preservation community feels a little better if they know we are at least have the virtual twin.”
Laser scanning is not new to Jarosz. With UWM students, he’s used this tool - which scans 900,000 points per second - to document and restore the 600-year-old Herstmonceux Castle in England, wooden pagodas in Japan and the ancient Italian town of Amelia. Laser scans of Notre Dame de Paris cathedral facilitated its rebuild after the 2019 fire. “ it helps with repair work, with identifying physical problems, analyzing the skin of the building,” Jarosz says. It costs around $800 for a small building and a few thousand dollars for a large building.
Illustration by Sophie Yufa
Earlier this year, Mayor Cavalier Johnson signed an ordinance into law that would require laser scanning the exterior of any historic building where a demolition permit has been filed. As of May, the Historic Preservation Commission was still fine-tuning the process. “We will be the first major US city that requires such a thing,” says Jarosz.
Compared with photos and drawings, laser scanning saves money and time - and is also more accurate. Says Tim Askin, senior planner with the city’s Historic Preservation Commission. “ it will be actual detailed information you can take measurements off of, instead of a 40-year-old photo,” he says. “ you can go out in the field and draw by hand, but even on a single-family house, it’s probably a day per side of the building, Justin, the fieldwork.”