Towers with Minds of Their Own

By Michael Walsh

Soaring 45 stories over downtown Dallas, the office tower called Lincoln Plaza looks like nothing more than an especially elegant variation on the modern commercial building. Mahogany granite and smoked glass combine to give it a handsome, robust exterior. Full-grown, verdant trees shade its attractive walkways, and at the apex of its triangular base a small waterfall gurgles and sparkles in the sun. Lincoln Plaza is not only beautiful -- it has brains. Computers and closed-circuit monitors check the temperature on each floor, the location of every elevator and the status of all doors (locked or unlocked). When a clerical worker began pilfering from his employer's offices, the computers identified the owner of the electronic card key that was used to enter the burglarized rooms. The suspect was quickly apprehended. Says Steven Cole, the building manager: "I was very impressed."

Welcome to the world of smart buildings, a marriage of architecture and computers that is the latest word in high-rise high tech. Walk into an office in brainy buildings and the lights go on automatically, triggered by infrared sensors that detect the slightest movement; leave and the lights shut themselves off twelve minutes later. Desktop terminals linked to a centralized computer system offer instant access to the latest stock market quotations. A sophisticated telephone system automatically routes long-distance calls along the least expensive circuits. The elevators flash the current weather reports and talk to their passengers in a low, clear tone: "Going up."

In the lobbies, computerized directories cross-list tenants by company, individuals' names and service category. Sometimes they even offer calendars of arts and sports events, airport maps, taxi phone numbers and shuttle-bus guides. One particularly futuristic tower will soon permit a tenant at any display terminal to call up a lunch menu on the screen, punch in his order and have food delivered to his desk from one of the building's restaurants.

Smart buildings have sprung up in Los Angeles (Grand Financial Plaza), Chicago (One Financial Place), Arlington, Va. (Crystal Gateway III), and Hartford (CityPlace). Others are under construction in Denver and New York City. "Tenants want their buildings as smart as their communications equipment," says Geoffrey Wharton, a partner at Tishman-Speyer Properties in New York City, which is developing a smart building for the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Says William Caffery, a technology analyst at the Gartner Group, a research firm in Stamford, Conn.: "Communications is the air conditioning of the 1980s."

The technology does not come cheap. Builders figure that electronic gadgetry and the wire and cable networks that connect them add about 2% to construction costs. Average rent at Chicago's gleaming One Financial Place, a $220 million, 40-story chrome-and-marble trade palace that looks more like a hotel than an office building, runs from $29 to $33 per sq. ft., which is 20% higher than space in the city's other top commercial buildings.

Even with the steep overhead, smart buildings have no trouble attracting tenants. To stay competitive, owners of older, dumber structures are retrofitting them, bringing in computers and sensors and tearing out walls and ceilings to install the wiring necessary to raise their building intelligence quotients. The Park Avenue Atrium in New York City, for example, was stripped down to its structural steel during remedial reworking.

Some think the fuss is not worth the price. Rather than reducing costs, warns Robert Jones, an Atlanta regional manager with the real estate firm of Cushman and Wakefield, smart technology actually increases them; for one thing, more sophisticated workers are required to maintain the buildings. "We're no longer talking about boilers and fuse boxes," says Jones. "Maintenance crews today have to know what 'optimum start times' and 'digital control devices' mean." Others criticize the lack of choice implicit in a smart building, which gets its technology from only a few suppliers.

Despite the reservations, smart buildings appear to have no place to go but up. Last year nearly $100 million worth of communications equipment was sold to smart buildings, and analysts predict that the market will grow to $3 billion a year by 1990, when the U.S. may have as many as 1,600 smart buildings. Already Cushman's Dallas-based property manager, Jay Dee Allen, says that fully half his inquiries concern space in smart buildings. "Smart technology makes it easier to attract tenants," says Larry Guilmette, manager of Bronson and Hutensky, a co-developer of Hartford's CityPlace. "The fact that you can sell some sizzle gives you a higher profile." It doesn't take a smart building to figure that out.

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll/New York with other bureaus