Scan First, Design Second: Why Existing Conditions Deserve LiDAR
Renovation projects fail at the survey stage more often than the design stage. How we capture existing conditions with phone LiDAR before the first sketch.
Every architect who has worked on a renovation knows the moment: the existing drawings say one thing, the building says another. A wall is 40cm off, a beam nobody documented crosses the ceiling, the "3m" corridor is 2.7m. Most renovation budgets are not blown by ambitious design. They are blown by discovering the building late.
This is why our studio workflow starts with a scan, not a sketch. Phone LiDAR has quietly become good enough for early-stage spatial capture: point your device at a room, walk the space, and you have measurable geometry in minutes instead of a day of laser-distance measurements transcribed into a notebook.
To be precise about what that gives you: fast, reliable room geometry for design decisions: wall positions, openings, ceiling heights, the actual shape of the space. It does not replace an engineering survey where millimeter tolerance is contractually required. Knowing which of those two you need at which stage is the skill.
The workflow we settled on is simple. Scan the space on-site. Clean the capture and pull it into Rhino as the reference model. Design against the building as it actually exists, not as its 1980s drawings claim it exists. Every downstream decision (demolition scope, furniture layout, services routing) inherits the accuracy of that first capture.
We ended up building this workflow into a product: SpaceCraft, our iPhone LiDAR scanner, exists because we wanted the scan-first habit to cost minutes, not billable days. But the habit matters more than the tool. Whatever scanner you use: capture reality first. The building always wins arguments with the drawings.