The Glen Eyrie Castle
Glen Eyrie Castle
Glen Eyrie is a 33,000 square foot English Tudor-style castle built by General William Jackson Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs. It has 17 guest rooms, seven meeting rooms, including the 2,200 square foot Great Hall and two dining rooms. It has been added onto and remodeled many times over the last 152 years.
In 2022, our architecture team conducted a visual inspection and completed a lidar scan of both the interior and exterior of the historic Glen Eyrie Castle and created a detailed 3-D model and as-built drawings for the owner, The Navigators.
What is Lidar?
Lidar is a laser technology that uses light to measure and map buildings and the surrounding environment. It sends out a laser pulse, which bounces off objects and comes back to the sensor. The time it takes for the pulse to come back tells us how far away the object is. This creates detailed map of buildings and is especially useful when hand measuring would take a lot of time.
This laser-scanned image of the Glen Eyrie Castle captures millions of data points.
digital documentation of historic buildings
The development of lidar technology has revolutionized the process of documenting historical buildings. This technology allows architects and conservators to create detailed digital records of architectural features of the building that may otherwise be lost to decay or damage. Lidar, in particular, is well-suited to this task. It can scan large areas quickly and without physically interacting with hard-to-reach or hard-to-see areas of the building. For this project it was especially important to capture the existing mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire safety systems of the castle. The lidar scan was the perfect tool for the job.
Castle cross section.
What’s next for the Castle?
Now that that Navigators have a detailed 3-D model and as-built drawings they are building a capital campaign effort to raise funds for renovations and repairs to the castle. This effort is expected to take 3-5 years.