Jerrod wrote an entry back in July about walking the proposed road that had been staked for us by our topographers. Walking it, and understanding the topography of the area as well as Design Workshops’s intent, I was suspicious that the stakes weren’t quite where they were supposed to be. That, combined with a few other factors (including my fetishes for maps, satellite imagery, and GPS), led me to break down and look into expensive GIS (Geographical Information System) equipment: similar to the GPS you might have, but with a level of accuracy that can be less than a foot, and the ability import and export data in much more sophisticated ways.

So last month we went to the island with GIS equipment in hand. We had to get some additional equipment to be able to get readings through the jungle canopy, and for this first trip Chad Yoder from New Wave Geographics came down to help test the equipment and give us some basic training. After some initial tricky setup, the equipment now works really well: in open areas (without the jungle canopy overhead), we can get incredibly precise, subfoot readings. In the jungle it’s a lot harder: in some areas, getting enough satellites to get a good reading can take several minutes, and even then, we can only get accuracy of 18-24”. But  that’s good enough for our current purposes, so I found it incredibly fun to walk around and be able to see exactly where we were, and how it fit with the entire master plan.

Even for someone trained as an architect and used to visualizing spaces that don’t yet exist, the GIS equipment allows a level of precise understanding that I’m just not used to having at my fingertips. It also allows us to test actual site conditions against the conceptual plans being created for the project much more quickly (when you’re on an island, getting people like topographers out to stake buildings isn’t all that easy, and always takes at least 2-4 weeks). As another plus, it actually gives us better information than we can get from our topographers – yes, it turns out we were right in our suspicions, and the road they laid out for us in July was consistently incorrect by approximately 100 feet.

Among other things we checked out on the this trip, we looked very closely at the site of the Villa model home we’ll be starting construction on early next year. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are several boulders and trees that our architects will have to deal with: our goal is to cut down no tree over 6 inches in diameter, and to move as little earth as possible. A few simple shifts in the plan will help us dodge many of the trees this time around, but it looks like we’ll also have a few spots where the trees emerge through open are bridges and decks, which will be pretty cool.

We’ll be doing this sort of an exercise with every single building on the site.  Our mission for Isla Palenque demands it; unlike some of our competitors, we see our pristine jungle as an amenity and don’t plan to clear cut the island before starting on any architectural work. But our job is made much easier by the sorts of technological innovations that GIS represents. Actually, I’m not sure that it would have even been possible to conform to the landscape so precisely 10-20 years ago; maybe for one carefully built house, sure, but not at the scale of a 200-home development.