Two 22-story brick residential towers at 362 and 364 Rindge Avenue in Cambridge had just been through lead paint remediation on their steel window lintels. The job was a complete visual record of every lintel afterward, shot from the air, with nothing touching the building and no sidewalk closed.
Here is what that work actually looked like.
One close-up per lintel, not one photo per wall
The deliverable was not a set of elevation shots. It was a usable record: one labeled, high-resolution close-up of the steel lintel above every individual window, on all four sides of both buildings. That came to 3,667 separate images.
Each lintel was shot from roughly a floor below at a steep upward angle, so the steel and its freshly remediated coating are the subject, not a glare-filled pane of glass. We flew the shady side of each face and worked floor by floor, so the lighting stays even from the ground to the 22nd story.
Every one of the 3,667 frames shows a lintel at this level of detail.
Why a drone instead of a lift
After remediation, you want eyes on every lintel, top to bottom. A boom lift only reaches part of a 22-story building, and a swing stage means rigging, permits, and a crew on the wall for days. A Part 107 drone flight covers all four elevations of both towers in a fraction of the time, and it reaches the tight end walls between the buildings that a lift physically cannot.
Every image maps to an exact lintel
A pile of 3,667 photos is useless if you cannot tell which lintel you are looking at. Every file is named by building, elevation, floor, bay, and position, so any image points to one specific opening. The set is organized into folders by building, then elevation, then floor, and it ships with a gridded overview shot of each wall plus a short guide that explains the naming.
We document what we could not get, too
A few spots could not be fully captured: a ground-floor bay blocked by perimeter fencing, a bay behind site obstructions, and one end wall where FAA altitude limits in that airspace did not allow the standoff distance to frame the full elevation. Rather than quietly drop those, we flagged each one and included an obstruction reference photo, so the record is honest about its own gaps.
What you walk away with
A complete, labeled visual record of every lintel on both facades: organized so you can walk any elevation top to bottom, with overview shots to orient against and a guide that makes the whole set readable without us in the room.