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ST. LOUIS — They are, Michelle Swatek points out, the canary in the coal mine for the construction industry.

"If an architect is not working, in six months a contractor won’t be working and a plumber won’t be working," she said.

Swatek should know.

She’s the executive director of the St. Louis chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and she estimates the recession has forced more than 200 local architects out of jobs or into positions that fall outside their area of expertise, based on the number of people she’s talked to.

As the situation worsened, the AIA set aside $100,000 for displaced architects to borrow for professional development and, for those breaking into the field, licensing training.

Still, Swatek reasoned, something more needed to be done to help AIA members "maximize" their time to prepare for the return of the business of both drafting the designs of new buildings and reconfiguring existing structures for major renovations.

Enter the Bevo Mill, the south St. Louis landmark restaurant that has stood empty since March, two months after Anheuser-Busch gifted the building to the city.

St. Louis officials have since contracted with a Clayton firm, which this week had its staff preparing to reopen the restaurant sometime this fall.

In the Bevo Mill’s Bavarian styling and turreted Dutch windmill, the AIA saw an ideal template for a structural inquest to keep architectural skills sharp by introducing the profession’s latest technology.

Thus, the Bevo Mill Modeling Project was born.

On Monday morning, five curious architects hovered near an exotic looking surveying tool, its lasers trained on the exterior of the 92-year-old restaurant.

Laid-off architect Joe Bauer of Rock Hill said colleagues ignoring the technology that Kirkwood’s Seiler Instrument and Manufacturing Co. brought to the Bevo Mill do so at their own peril.

"It’s the wave of the future," he said.

Over the past 30 years, the architectural community has moved from drafting boards to computers to the digitalized Building Information Modeling that now provides the profession with three-dimensional blueprints of new and existing structures alike absolutely free credit report.

The Trimble GX 3D laser scanner the Seiler representatives showcased at the Bevo Mill takes the technology to the next step by measuring a building’s architectural details on site.

"You now have a living, working model of the actual structure," Seiler’s Harvey Wright said of technology fast integrating itself into architectural circles.

The Bevo Mill project has given unemployed architect Kelly Duepner of St. Louis a glimpse of her profession’s past and future.

The past materialized in a review of sepia-toned renderings, based on the original design, that were prepared for a 1980s rehab.

On Tuesday afternoon, in the company of other architects that meet each week at AIA’s downtown headquarters to compare notes, the future flashed on a screen in a crowded conference room.

"Four million points of information," Duepner marveled.

Indeed, the detail of the interior and exterior measurements exacted by the Trimble GX extended to the leaves on surrounding trees and the feathers on the pigeons atop the roof.

The technology allowed the architects to determine the thickness of the Bevo Mill walls, a process that might have taken hours using hand-held lasers and pad and paper, in a matter of moments.

Ultimately, Swatek said, the awe factor will deliver a huge upside for the city, which can use the data for future upgrades of the building, and architects alike.

"They’re getting a learning curve while they are laid off," she said.

With countless unemployed architects besieging firms whenever a vacancy occurs (which isn’t often), Duepner will take advantage of every edge she can get.

"If you want to be re-employed, you have to know this stuff," Duepner said.

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