Case study · Institutional · Altoona, Iowa
A thousand kids needed somewhere to be
Southeast Polk kept growing until the arithmetic ran out, and the district went to its voters for a school. What The Weitz Company put on a 66-acre greenfield in Altoona is 210,000 square feet across two stories, built for more than a thousand sixth and seventh graders — and built against the one deadline in construction that genuinely cannot move, because a school year starts when it starts.
They made it. We mapped the site from the same vantage every other week for twelve months, so the district could watch a field turn into a school one frame at a time and never had to wonder whether the date was still real.
Southeast Polk Middle School, 30 September 2024 — open, full, and three months past completion.
- Built for
- 1,000+Sixth and seventh graders
- Building
- 210,000Square feet, two stories on 66 acres
- Built by
- WeitzWith FRK Architects, for Southeast Polk CSD
- Documentation
- 19 mapsJune 2023 – June 2024, biweekly
Why the same vantage matters
A 66-acre site is too big to hold in your head. Stand anywhere on it and you see a corner; walk it and you see a sequence. Neither tells a school board, a community, or a superintendent whether the parking is ahead of the building or behind it.
Weitz ran this build to a schedule tight enough that the district could plan a school year around it, and it opened on time. Our job was narrower and simpler: put the whole site in one frame, from the same position, on the same cadence, so that every stakeholder was looking at the same thing and nobody had to take progress on faith.
Nineteen maps, one position, twelve months. The value is not in any single frame — it is in the fact that they are all the same frame.
June 2023 to June 2024
Four frames out of the nineteen, far enough apart to read at a glance: the structure up but the site still raw and full of laydown in mid-2023; the building enclosed and the drives and lots taking shape by October; paving, striping and turf establishing through spring; and the finished campus once the last construction traffic clears in June.
Four of nineteen site maps, 27 June 2023 to 22 June 2024. All nineteen were flown from the same position to the same framing, every other week; these four are simply the ones that read clearly at this size.
Drag the handle: one year, one position
The same ground on 27 June 2023 and 22 June 2024, registered to each other so the building does not shift as you drag. Everything that changes is work: bare fill becomes graded lawn, the laydown yard becomes a parking lot, the roof deck closes, and the drives get their surface.
Left of the handle is June 2024, right of it June 2023. Drag, or focus the control and use the arrow keys.
What it is worth afterwards
Construction documentation earns its keep twice. During the build it answers the weekly question. Afterwards it becomes the only complete visual record of how the site was assembled — where the utilities ran before the parking went over them, what the subgrade looked like, which sequence the drives were poured in.
That record does not exist unless somebody flies it while the work is happening. Two years on, Southeast Polk has it and it cost the schedule nothing.
Building on a greenfield, or anything too large to photograph from the ground? This is what a year of it looks like.
Start a documentation program →Building program details from The Weitz Company and Southeast Polk Community School District. Imagery flown under FAA Part 107 and delivered to the project team.