MONUMENT SQ.—The Loring-Greenough House has been scanned and digitized into hologram-style 3-D images to document its historic details.
The scan was performed by Feldman Land Surveyors, the same company that recently created a similar digital version of the historic Curley House on the Jamaicaway.
“The scan is both a preservation tool and [also] will hopefully help with determining areas that need work,” JP Historical Society President Gretchen Grozier told the Gazette. “We can also use it for fundraising.”
The historic house museum at 12 South St. in Monument Square has stood in that spot for two-and-a-half centuries. It is currently owned by the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club (JPTC), which saved it from demolition in the 1920s.
Feldman offered the scan for free to the JPTC and performed the work earlier this year. The process involves using a laser machine to scan the entire structure as black-and-white imagery, which later had color added. The highly detailed scans capture everything from the exterior landscaping, to books on shelves inside, to the decorations in fireplace mantles.
“It has been our hope that the interior of the Loring-Greenough might also be scanned at some point to complete the documentation of the house as it is in 2015 and to give many additional educational opportunities for the community,” Andrew Hatcher, a member of the JPTC House Committee, told the Gazette.
The Curley House scan has been used as part of a class on conservation at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Hatcher said the JPTC will be meeting with the professors of that course in “a few weeks” to discuss possibilities for the Loring-Greenough House.
Although the JPTC is “only starting to consider the many ways we could make use of the scans,” Hatcher said, they are already considering using it for documentation and preservation of the structure.
“The possibilities are endless. The scan itself is only the beginning and an invitation to creativity,” Hatcher said.
One possibility is on-site and off-site virtual tours “possibly slowed down and combined with still photographs and information about particular objects in our collection, or the history of the people who once occupied these rooms.”
The scan would also allow for “an absolutely accurate exterior footprint of the house in two dimensions for use in developing a master plan for the property, another project the JPTC is working on,” Hatcher said.
A 3-D laser scan of the Loring-Greenough House done by Feldman Land Surveyors earlier this month. (Image Courtesy Feldman Land Surveyors)