Every major project deserves a visual record to match, and sixteen months of work cannot be told through a handful of photographs. TimelapseLab supported Cantieri S.p.A. with the monitoring of the construction site on via Uccelli.
The installed device remained connected to the TimelapseLab cloud platform for the entire duration of the works, capturing images at regular intervals. The result is a well-organised archive from which the progress of the site can be reconstructed through site monitoring and from which time-lapse content can be produced.
Projects of this length always show the same pattern: the early phases, the ones that determine everything else, become the hardest to reconstruct when they are needed. Excavation, foundations and structural works are covered by subsequent work, and a year later the only way to know how they were carried out is to have documented them as they happened.
For the contractor, this translates into a tangible advantage in the final stages and after handover. Inspections, acceptance testing and any requests for clarification can be answered from a dated archive, without resorting to invasive investigations or to reconstructions based on the recollections of those who were on site.
On a sixteen-month project, the way the archive is used also changes over time. In the first weeks it serves mainly to check progress; around the midpoint it becomes a tool for comparison against the programme; in the final stages it is the material used to prepare handover. The same set of images meets three different needs depending on the moment, and none of the three would be covered by an occasional photographic survey.
Over sixteen months, the weight of the various stakeholders also shifts. In the early stages the dialogue is with the works supervisor, then the specialist subcontractors come in, and finally the acceptance inspectors. Each arrives with different questions about the same site, and a searchable archive makes it possible to answer them without calling back those who have already completed their part, significantly reducing the time each step takes away from progress on site.
The monitoring of the via Uccelli site documented the construction process through periodic images, as distinct from continuous video surveillance, with automatic blurring of faces and number plates in line with a GDPR-by-design approach. The archive remains available as documentation of the completed works.
