Safety First: Rudin’s Intelligent Office Buildings

Utility companies can now give building owners a 30-second warning before a power outage. However, a conventional office building doesn’t have the capacity to do much about it.

“One of the things that keeps us up at night is if we have a blackout or brownout and people get stuck in our elevators,” said John Gilbert, senior vice president for Rudin Management.

“That led us on a journey to travel around the world looking for anybody who had actually created an operating system for the built environment — we ended up building that ourselves,” he said. “What that system does is first and foremost it integrates all the different subsystems of the building… the operating system is a brain for the building.”

That brain is able to detect the warning signal for the utility company — a frequency surge 30 seconds before a power outage — and direct elevators to the nearest floor to open their doors.

Gilbert will share more details on how smart building systems help save Rudin money across its portfolio of 10 million square feet of office space at DisruptCRE, a technology forum to be held March 30 at 180 Maiden Lane, New York City.

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