The St. Louis Aquarium was a 120,000-square-foot renovation of Union Station in St. Louis, a National Historic Landmark that originally opened in 1894. Certain elements of an aquarium, especially large viewing windows with thousands of pounds of water pressure behind them, require very precise measurements with virtually no room for error during placement. Through the use of laser scanning and BIM, McCarthy pre-coordinated these difficult field installation conditions with the glass manufacturer to ensure that delicate measurements and installations were physically possible prior to the deployment of expensive cranes and labor on site. Using a point cloud to create a digital model, we identified a very small part of the concrete frame that would have caused installation delays, adjusted the frame accordingly, and kept the installation on schedule and on budget.
$200,000 saved by avoiding delays with expensive equipment on site
laser scanning concrete rebates for a one-time acrylic placement process, multi-day effort if rebate tolerance is not met
Laser Scanning
