As current buildings make their way toward becoming interactive architectural environments that increasingly gain capabilities to adapt, you can begin to imagine how that kind of building’s communication system will act like a “nervous system” that travels throughout the building infrastructure. But you may ask yourself, just how might this “wiring” take place? And how can we prevent that communication infrastructure from being redundant both in the labor it takes to build, and in its ability to sync with dispersed sensors throughout the building.

According to the article entitled Turning HVAC into RFID, HVAC ducts are a very useful way to create a building wide antenna that can serve to help process incoming information from RFID antenna sensor networks that control various systems within a building. What this all means is that most of a building’s nervous system can go from being wired, to being wireless.

As was pointed out in the article, we have many systems within a building that work from sensors, including temperature control, fire and security systems. And while such wireless communication may prove to work very well for certain building needs, it may not quite work as well for others. But just as with any new technological ideas, there will be limitations and challenges. However, finding ways to make communication more efficient within smart buildings, is a step in the right direction.

Adding Functionality by Enhancing Your Building’s “Nervous System”

Today many buildings are rather static, depending on their own occupants to make them “operable” by physically adjusting so many of their components. Yes, buildings today have an array of Read more

As the World Wide Web and social media encourage more and more digital and virtual social interactions, will the role of the architectural building system have a new place in contributing to or detracting from the way we humans interact with each other? With so so many people now using social media, I think the answer is yes.

In an article I read recently called Is a Social Crash Coming, the notion of a “hyper-connectivity” surfaces along with its ramifications in terms of human touch — or the ability for people to engage in person-to-person interactions. As an architect, I think this is a very interesting topic, especially when thinking about the role architecture has had. As an example, think of the effect of the “agora” as a Greek gathering place…it changed the dynamic of how people interrelated and behaved.

As the World Wide Web and social media make us more “present” in the minds of so many more people than ever before, I think that architectural design will need to Read more

I’m sure you like to stay in nice hotels. That personalized experience where hotel services cater to your needs is always a treat. That’s why today’s convergence technology will be really sprucing up the hotels of tomorrow — sooner than you might think.

As you will learn from the video below, building systems are being created where sensors will measure just about everything from room temperature to mold spores. That information combined with the manually controlled preferences entered by each hotel visitor will yield, as you can imagine, collected data that will be quite overwhelming in volume — particularly because it is first divided into a building’s subsystems.

That’s where convergence comes in.

By converging all of that sensory data into a central “hub”, everything will be interconnected; thus, allowing the building system to make sense of all that data.

As you watch the following video, you will Read more