Shaughnessy House Conservatory

As a secondary aspect of the Shaughnessy House conservatory’s conservation mandate, EVOQ was required to update the client’s existing 3D digital model to attain a higher level of detail and to correspond accurately to the as-found site conditions. Documentation and representation of the existing conditions would have proven challenging with traditional survey methods due to the conservatory’s complex and highly detailed geometry, and the fact that the cast-iron structure had settled and warped in the century since its construction.

EVOQ developed and leveraged a heritage BIM (H-BIM) methodology using Revit by Autodesk for this project. The existing structure was laser scanned to generate a point cloud, a geospatial data set consisting of individual points defined by their x, y, and z coordinates, which provided an accurate foundation for parametric 3D modelling.

Given the nature of cast iron structure’s thermal bridging properties, the H-BIM model was also leveraged for hygrothermal design iterations to ensure improved performance. Working together with building envelope specialists, UL Solutions, multiple iterations of construction details were tested in critical areas of the conservatory. This was performed using THERM software, a program which graphically represents two-dimensional heat-transfer effects in building components.