Buildings Attuned to Ways People Work

The building of the future will have rooms that adjust their own temperature, fewer desks, portable personal phones and the ability to protect itself from a security breach.

Experts say all these features will be common in “smart buildings,” high-technology structures that have electronic sensors and microprocessors in every room.

“We really look at the building as a reflection of business strategy--what does the building need to do. What does a company want to do with its people,” said Nigel Dowler, marketing manager for “intelligent buildings” for Digital Equipment Corp. in Britain.

Digital has just started a British-based intelligent buildings division that will expand around the world in the next year.

The company becomes involved with clients even before the design stage of a new building to determine not only their computing needs, but staffing issues as well.

It is now designing a building for a customer service division that will offer “working modules” for different types of activity rather than personal desks.

When staff members who are frequently out of the office return they can choose a workstation with electronic mail, a traditional desk for writing reports or a conference room.

The building will have a single cable for data, voice, security, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning services.

Advances in technology have turned the building controls market on its head over the last five years and sent demand soaring, according to Alan McHale, consultant with the British consulting firm Proplan.

A recent Proplan report on intelligent building controls predicts that annual sales in the European Community market, about a third of the world total, will reach $1.25 billion by 1995, double the $640 million of 1990.

The growth is attracting numerous new firms, particularly computer companies.

While Digital Equipment is aggressively going after the building controls market, International Business Machines Corp. has formed an alliance with several Japanese companies to design intelligent buildings.

The big three suppliers remain Honeywell Inc. and Johnson Controls Inc. of the United States and Landis und Gyr Holding AG of Switzerland. But there are more than 70 companies selling building control systems, according to Proplan.

Energy-efficiency was the original goal of smart buildings. Most new buildings in the last 20 years have had some sort of electronic control built in to run the air-conditioning, heating, ventilation and elevators.

The newest automatic controls can raise or lower the temperature of each room and adjust the lighting level according to the number of people inside, saving 30% or more on a large building’s fuel bill.

But flexibility is the goal of the newest systems. Jeremy Stanyard, director of project management for London-based PA Consulting Group, said firms must be able to move people or change job functions in a competitive environment.

An intelligent building can allow organizations to change the way they use their staff.

Stanyard said cordless communications would allow a building to move beyond universal cabling to no wires at all.

Consultants predict that in the next five years standard telephone exchanges could be replaced with radio-transmitted signals to staff carrying cordless phones and even hand-held computers with radio links.

“The implications are very far-reaching,” said Stanyard. “Employees will no longer be chained to their desks. Home offices could become a real possibility.”

Companies will also be able to manage a number of different sites from a single location.

Combining new technologies such as neural networks--computers that can learn very much like a human brain--and artificial intelligence will allow the internal workings of a building to create an optimal environment without being monitored.

Sensors throughout a room will constantly transmit back to a central computer data on temperature, humidity, occupancy and air pollutants and program the buildings’ systems accordingly.