Rebuilding a tower off the wrong building's blueprints
The 301 W Osborn model kept coming out wrong because it had been built against a different building's drawings.
The Revit shell rebuild for 301 W Osborn had stalled. We dug into why and traced the model's recurring wrong dimensions back to where they started.
The steel, thirty-column framing the model kept producing came from a reconciliation against a 1971 plan set for 300 W Osborn, which is a different building across the street. It was not 301's actual concrete tower. No amount of further modeling could fix a foundation built on the wrong document.
With the mix-up confirmed, I had us throw out the source data completely and rebuild the model's foundation from real site photos and markups. The actual building is a concrete tower with 26 columns, 151 feet 11 inches by 72 feet 3 inches. We then stopped rebuilding in Revit from scratch and assembled from real architect CAD files that had existed the whole time.
When the numbers keep almost fitting, check whether you are even looking at the right building. This was an honest error, easy to make between two buildings so close together, and it got fixed the moment someone checked the source.
Story details
| Project | 301 W Osborn |
|---|---|
| Type | Mistake and repair |
| Year | 2026 |
| Firm telling | on the Common Ground wiki |