Buildings and the new challenges of society
Society’s plan for climate transition and decarbonisation also brings new challenges to buildings, requiring increasingly sustainable design and construction solutions.
The workplace is now designed and managed by each organisation at an increasingly strategic level. Physical space is now seen as an agent for transmitting organisational culture, and the comfort and services associated with it play a vital role in attracting and retaining talent. Today, attractive, flexible workspaces that contribute to employee well-being are sought.
Given that buildings are responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, society’s plan for climate transition and decarbonisation also brings new challenges to buildings, requiring increasingly sustainable design and construction solutions and increasingly efficient use of buildings that are tailored to their intended use.
Buildings have thus become an asset of great importance in responding to the challenges we face today and that impact our future. However, only with a holistic and integrated approach involving all stakeholders and, simultaneously, taking advantage of digital transformation and technological evolution, will we be able to maximize the value of buildings for society.
It is clear that there is a huge gap between all the stakeholders involved in the life cycle of a building, namely investors, designers, builders and maintenance companies. BIM (Building Information Model), a collaborative process that allows different stakeholders from the design and construction phases to interact in a single 3D virtual model of the building, has come to fill part of this gap. It is already a great development, but it is not enough.
Knowing that on the one hand more than 85% of the costs of the life cycle of a building occur in the operation phase and on the other hand that it is in the design and construction phase that these future costs can be most influenced, it is essential that this collaborative process also begins to involve the entities that manage the buildings, taking into account that they have enormous knowledge of the real cost and impact of the solutions initially defined on future performance and sustainability.
Large buildings, particularly non-residential ones, have been considerably advanced for many years, with centralized technical management systems that mirror all the main equipment and systems, allowing their operation to be monitored and centralized action taken whenever necessary. The companies that manage these buildings are also quite advanced, with apps and management software that record all maintenance activities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now making it possible to transform the huge databases of these maintenance software programs into real knowledge. We now have AI tools that read the text recorded by field teams during various interventions on equipment, converting it into standardized actions. We are also beginning to cross-reference this information with real-time monitoring of building behavior – temperature, pressure, vibration, occupancy, air quality sensors – which is now possible with the Internet of Things (IoT).
The potential of these tools is enormous. We will not only be able to manage buildings better, in a more sustainable way and focusing on people’s well-being, but we will also have knowledge and experience that, if introduced in the design and construction phases, will allow us to maximize value creation.
We are clearly on the right track, but there is still a lot of work to be done, as long as we have vision and will.
