Historic Fishtown

Along the Lake Michigan shore of Leland, Michigan lays historic Fishtown made up of numerous weathered fishing shanties, smokehouses, souvenir shops, restaurants, and more. Nearly half of the "town" rests on stilts and a boardwalk, along with its docks standing at the edge of the Leland River. Once the heart of a commercial fishing village, the structures and docks are real places where people can walk through, see, and feel a connection to the areas' great fishing heritage. The aura is incredibly unique and is something the local citizens are determined to preserve.

Working with Hopkins Burns Design Studio, JJR, and the Fishtown Preservation Society, Midwestern Consulting provided HDS service to document the locations of the entire Fishtown for future maintenance and preservation purposes.

Many of the buildings were originally planned with great haste. Rarely do buildings lie perpendicular, plumb, or parallel to one another. This presented the architects with a nearly impossible task of measuring and locating the buildings in their exact, existing conditions.

Midwestern Consulting provided our client with an accurate 3D wireframe of all the buildings from which the architects performed massing studies. Often performed by architects, massing studies explore present and future spatial relationships. For instance, Hopkins Burns found that one of shops was originally facing south, but now faced east. If the building is rotated back to its original position, a massing study will reveal the spatial impact.

As the project developed, the 3D wireframes were imported into Google Sketchup to generate 3D solid masses and the photo images were overlaid that will put Fishtown into Google Earth. In addition, a topographic survey of the entire area was also needed. This was easily created directly from our 50-million point 3D data point cloud. No total station needed.