Architecture is one of the last major professions yet to be swept up in the digital tide. There are some advanced design tools commonly available to civil engineers, but advanced imaging tools are rarely made use of. The latter tend to be still too expensive for many local construction companies, and they remain almost completely out of reach for the types of organizations that do inspections, renovations, or preservation work.

Following the blaze at Notre Dame de Paris, attention naturally turned toward efforts to rebuild, and that led to the realization that an enormous amount of information had already been collected on the cathedral, a volume of data so enormous it surprised even some of the experts involved in both the imaging and the civil engineering fields. Also fascinating were the range of new tools that might be volunteered for the reconstruction, including lidar, thermal imaging, holographic interferometry, and x-ray equipment. The discussion also included talk of robots and airborne drones, upon which sensors can be mounted, that can get to places that before were impractical or impossible to reach otherwise.

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The response to the fire at Notre Dame also distorts the view of what’s typical in civil engineering. There are few if any digital tools specifically for use in construction. There are few if any dedicated tools for inspecting structures, during construction or after. There are few if any dedicated tools for any type of non-visual evaluations.

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