Historic Preservation Program Documents the World's Heritage

Few monuments have imprinted themselves as indelibly on the American psyche as the Statue of Liberty.

Yet for all the thousands of snapshots that capture Lady Liberty’s likeness each year, the National Park Service needed renderings detailed enough that it could maintain the massive structure or even replace it should calamity strike.

In 2001, a team of architects and students from Texas Tech’s Historic Preservation Program in the College of Architecture began a massive project to document the statue using 3-D laser scanning equipment and hi-definition panoramic photography.

Blanketing the structure in laser points, team members recorded data that allowed them to generate highly accurate structural data, allowing the Park Service to preserve the statue that has greeted immigrants and visitors to the United States for more than a century.

Texas Tech’s Historic Preservation Program has documented other such landmarks using this 3-D technology.

Professor Elizabeth Louden led a team that created the first measured drawings of General Washington’s Sleeping Tent in Valley Forge. The virtual images were used to repair and restore the tent, which housed George Washington during the Revolution.

Projects also have documented petroglyphs in Cowhead Mesa on the Brazos River and rock art in Perdenales Cave.

Texas Tech even has sent researchers oversees, documenting the Santa Maria Antiqua at the Roman Forum in Rome – a Roman Catholic Church built in the 5th Century and now a World Heritage Site.