BUILDING SMART
Smart buildings: at the
INFLECTION POINT Market segment offers GCs and subs opportunities for growth and a new, collaborative approach BY DAVID KENNEDY
I
t is still relatively early days for Canada’s smart building market. Most projects continue to take the conventional route, employing HVAC, electrical, lighting, security and other such systems in their separate silos. But early adopters have begun to look at buildings not as a jumble of interdependent systems, but as the system as a whole, capable of integrating subsystems to improve energy use, guide automation and optimize the wide array of connected components.
38 / APRIL 2021
Smart building discussions have been ongoing in the construction industry for at least 20 years, according to Sam Boyajian, vice-president of Integrated Building Technology at Modern Niagara. For 15 of those 20, however, it was little more than talk, with owners not typically ready to take the plunge, he said during a panel discussion with three industry experts hosted by On-Site, HPAC and Electrical Business magazines this March. “Now,” he says, “I would argue that
the owners and the developers have sort of leapfrogged the engineering community, and now they’re starting to pull the rest of us along because now they’re demanding it.” “We’re at a bit of an inflection point,” Boyajian adds. In Canada, governments building hospitals have been among the first movers, partly because smart building systems offer the most discernible benefits to larger facilities.
