What are Smart Buildings?

The technological revolution is also making its way into the architecture and design industry: Smart Buildings are improving our everyday lives at home and at work. A key feature of these Smart buildings is technological innovation. That is, their infrastructure and facilities are equipped with automated processes that optimize energy efficiency, safety, usability, and accessibility. Technology is deployed to work for people in homes, offices, warehouses, etc. In doing so, the various systems serve a specific purpose, which is in the end to provide greater comfort, convenience and safety to the occupants or users of the buildings, who ultimately have to pay for the building automation.

Benefits for businesses

Advancing building automation offers a wealth of opportunities and possibilities to reshape and continually improve the working environment for businesses. This not only conserves resources, but rather significantly improves the quality of life and comfort of users. After all, employee satisfaction depends heavily on how much control they have over their work environment.

In today's working world, employees expect their workplace to offer them maximum creativity and flexibility in order to work productively and efficiently. In Smart Buildings, employees find precisely these conditions: Here, various applications are networked and coordinated with each other to make working as pleasant, efficient and secure as possible.

Smart Offices, for example, can optimize the booking and utilization of meeting rooms. In addition, intelligent solutions make it possible to navigate visitors to the appropriate meeting room by the fastest route. Service processes, for example in facility management, can also be made more efficient, as service staff only need to press a button – routine and often unnecessary checks are no longer necessary. Smart Offices thus provide enormous time and labor savings and can maximize the degree of utilization of a building.

In times of home-working one of the disadvantages is that empty offices are often fully air-conditioned despite low usage. This is a challenge that will have to be overcome in the future. Overall, however, Smart buildings are precisely designed to save energy and minimize operating costs. This is a crucial factor, especially in the current global economic situation with Ukraine and the climate crisis.

In terms of sustainability: In Germany alone, 35 % of energy consumption and 30 % of CO2 emissions are caused by the building sector. The automation of processes in Smart Buildings helps to significantly increase the efficiency of these buildings and thus reduce emissions and save costs. Ideal Smart Building therefore not only achieve an increase in efficiency through optimized heating and ventilation control – they also make use of other building data such as the aforementioned use of meeting rooms or weather forecasts.

Overall, increasing the economic efficiency of a building as well as its efficient operation is the ideal lever for the realization of Smart Buildings, which is strongly supported by the EU with its funding programs.

The development of Smart Buildings

The concept of Smart Buildings has been around for decades. Intelligently networked buildings as we know them today are the result of several different experiences and developments from the past.

For example, the development of Smart Buildings overlapped with the boom in real estate markets, which was fueled by growth in the service sector. As a result, new buildings could now be equipped from the outset with centralized electronic networks, as well as communications systems for text, voice, and image transmission.

With the public accessibility of the World Wide Web in 1991, our relationship with technology fundamentally changed, triggering a shift in the way we work and the environment in which we work. The concept of the open-plan office to foster collaboration became more prevalent, and companies networked digitally with one another. Innovative systems were introduced in buildings, reducing maintenance costs and energy consumption.

Since the turn of the century, the concept of Smart Buildings has been developed in many ways. Several concepts of Smart buildings have been adopted in the design of Smart Buildings. However, the construction of the first Smart Buildings in the U.S., the Netherlands and Asia was not too long ago.

Today, automated building systems are used to increase the efficiency of Smart Buildings. For example, Smart Buildings are characterized by a higher degree of adaptability and flexibility than conventional buildings. Factors such as speed, accessibility and comfort are becoming increasingly important – especially in the context of New Work. As a result, tomorrow's buildings must be able to respond to new demands while adapting to changing environments.

However, exactly what Smart Buildings will be capable of achieving in a few years' time cannot be foreseen in detail. One thing is certain, however: Smart Buildings will play an essential role in the future of us all.