VIOHALCO Industrial Scan2BIM project

Industrial Scan2BIM as-built documentation of the former VIOHALCO factory complex — Pireos 252, Athens, Greece

Purpose

NOVAL Property — one of Greece’s largest real-estate investment companies, with a portfolio of about 430,000 sq.m. across offices, retail, hotels and former industrial assets — assigned Astrolabe Engineering the complete as-built 3D documentation of the former Viohalco factory complex at 252 Pireos Street, Athens in May 2020.

The site is one of the very few large industrial properties still embedded in the urban fabric of central Athens. NOVAL Property’s redevelopment plan turns it into a mixed-use, tourism, cultural and residential hub — two hotels, a park of more than 30,000 sq.m., a museum, a technology research and development centre, and sports and leisure facilities. The project is advancing through Greece’s strategic-investment framework toward construction.

For a complex of this size and age, accurate, geometrically reliable, complete as-built data was a precondition for everything that followed — masterplan design, the strategic-investment regulatory filings, and downstream architectural, structural and MEP planning. Existing drawings on a site like this are typically incomplete and out of date. The brief was straightforward but demanding: capture the site as it actually is, in full, with no gaps, in a form ready to drive design.

Project tasks

The complex spans a land parcel of 72,569 sq.m. and consists of 26 buildings with a total built-up area of 43,868 sq.m. — mostly single-storey, with four buildings rising one or two floors. The footprint runs from heavy industrial shells to ancillary structures, and includes two buildings designated as Listed under industrial-heritage protection. The HALCOR sales department continued to operate on parts of the site throughout the survey.

To deliver as-built capture at that scale within tight schedule constraints, Astrolabe Engineering fielded two parallel 3D laser scanning crews, mobilised on 27 May 2020. Both crews operated a mix of FARO Focus X130 and M70 terrestrial laser scanners — with ranges from 0.6 m up to 70 / 130 m, ±2–3 mm range accuracy, scan speeds up to 976,000 points per second, and built-in HDR cameras for RGB colouring. The mix of models gave each crew the right reach for the space they were in — from confined ancillary corridors to long industrial-hall sight-lines and outdoor yards.

Coordination was the central challenge of the field phase. The two crews had to:

• work simultaneously across 26 buildings — including the two Listed industrial-heritage shells — without colliding or losing track of registration coverage across the parcel,
• alternate between indoor and outdoor capture — tall industrial halls, narrow ancillary corridors, machine spaces, courtyards, and roof structures, each with its own access, lighting and target-placement constraints, and
• share the site with live HALCOR sales operations, routing scan positions around staff and customer movement, plant equipment, and active loading and dispatch areas.

The field campaign ran from 27 May to 22 June 2020 across the 26 buildings and produced 1,405 scan positions — 40% above the initial 1,000-scan forecast, driven by the geometric complexity revealed once the crews were on site. The point cloud was captured at 5 mm average resolution and georeferenced to the Greek Geodetic Reference System 1987 (HGRS87) via GNSS-determined ground control points, so that the dataset sat in a single, project-wide coordinate frame ready for downstream design work.

To get the data into NOVAL Property’s hands as fast as possible, the survey was broken into three building groups delivered in sequence:

• Group A — 12 buildings (#12–22), 16,270 sq.m.
• Group B — 3 buildings (#7, 9, 10), 11,301 sq.m.
• Group C — 11 buildings (#1–6, 8, 23, 24, 24α, 24β, 25, 26), 17,015 sq.m.

Astrolabe Engineering’s Scan2BIM team began processing the first 3D data while the field crews were still capturing later groups, so that NOVAL Property’s design team could start using Group A’s pointcloud and model while Groups B and C were still in the pipeline. Group A delivery completed at +30 working days from the start of works, Group B at +50, Group C at +75 — bringing the project to final delivery in mid-September 2020.

Conclusion — Results

The final deliverables were:

• A 3D RGB pointcloud of the whole complex, georeferenced to HGRS87 and delivered in Autodesk ReCap (.rcp) — directly loadable into Revit, AutoCAD and the wider Autodesk stack.
• A BIM model of the 26-building complex in Autodesk Revit RVT, at LOD 200, covering all visible structural elements (slabs, columns, beams), architectural elements (walls, partitions, openings, stairs), and roofs with their steel-truss supports.
• A full set of architectural plans, elevations and sections per building, generated directly from the BIM model as georeferenced AutoCAD vector drawings.

Registration accuracy across the parcel held below ±1 cm — sufficient for the structural and architectural decisions the model needed to support, including the heritage-retention treatment of the two Listed buildings.

The deliverables became the as-built foundation for the masterplan development and the strategic-investment regulatory filings — turning a decades-old industrial site into a single, geometrically reliable as-built model that NOVAL Property’s design and approvals teams can work from.

Work With Us

We’re proud of the work and equally proud of the team behind it. Thinking about a Scan2BIM survey on an industrial or large-scale complex of your own? Tell us about your site — we’d be glad to talk.