Exhibition at the Eugene and Clare Thaw Research and Education Center at the Edwin Brooks House

Historic Santa Fe Foundation Presents: Viewing the World Through a Different Lens

As the owner of Southwest Scanning, Scott Ernst documents heritage as well as

contemporary buildings using several 3D Digital Documentation technologies

which allow him to capture virtual replicas of structures and bring them back to

the office. The typical goal is to use these models to generate as-built drawings

for restoration, adaptive reuse, or engineering analysis. Creating these drawings

involves working with the models in different software packages, clipping them

into segments to isolate particular areas in the models and view them in different

ways.

Over the years, Scott has found that there is beauty to be found and and there

are stories to be told about the history of the buildings within those scans. From

incidental portraits and timelines of cultural changes, deterioration and rebirth;

to abstract washes of color, this exhibit will show some of these hidden stories.

Scott Ernst has been working in the preservation field, as both a craftsman

and digital documentarian since 2009. Working extensively in New Mexico

and across the American West he has been involved in projects ranging from

the replication of traditional window sashes to the documentation of historic

commercial buildings, churches and environmental sculptures as well as early

twentieth century, timber framed mine structures.

Whether he is spending a day or two scanning an historic adobe in Santa Fe

or camping for several weeks alongside a c. 1905 ore tramway in Death

Valley, Scott finds that the work allows him the time to think about the

people who built these things, wonder about the times they lived in, the

technologies that they lived with and to see the subject in deeper ways than if

he were a casual visitor.