21st Century collaboration for 21st Century building (#18york)
If you don’t have time to read this blog: at least check this out – www.smart18york.com
Ricardo is right: partnerships play a strategic role in making buildings and cities smarter (welcome to the blogging team, Ricardo). When we talk about convergence, integration, and IP-enabled buildings, we may take “the process” by which to put these together a little for granted. Although for most of us this is all not rocket-science anymore; we are, however, dealing with an industry (one that plans and builds cities and buildings) that hasn’t seen much innovation in the last few decades. New and innovate partnerships, and out-of-the-box collaboration is necessary to create 21st century cities and buildings.
For one of Toronto’s latest high-rise commercial buildings, we’re doing just that. The industry has come together to JOINTLY collaborate on creating a true converged and integrated work environment for PWC’s new Canadian headquarter. This state-of-the art building (www.18york.com) has a fourth utility (IP backbone) that serves as the central nervous system of the property. The integration of lighting, telephony, metering and the supervisory control of the its Centralized Management System will provide PWC immediately with the ability to monitor and control (through web access but also through the Cisco IP Phone) their energy consumption and (initially) also there lighting.
This is just the beginning. Because of the future-ready network, PWC and the building owner will now continue to expand on their services to further optimize the performance of the building and reduce energy consumption and cost for operating it.
The project team has agreed to share the progress and this exciting collaboration with the world. Talk about transparency. Using social media, we will inform the client, the industry, and everyone who is interested how we are doing what we are doing. Kudos to EllisDon, Flexity, Guild Electric, Mulvey+Banani, Lutron, FifthLight, Canem, A.R.E.A Solutions and Cisco. Follow the progress on www.smart18york.com and visit back often.
