As a partner at Ennead, the Manhattan architecture firm, Tomas Rossant has helped many colleges and universities develop master plans. He generally begins by spending a day observing people moving around campus, but what he finds, he admits, is “situational and subjective; it’s affected by whether it’s raining and whether it’s homecoming weekend, and so on.” So Ennead’s applied-computing department has developed an app to track where students and faculty go and when—potentially a better way to document campus activity. Rossant can’t talk about the details yet, but he has met with venture capitalists about turning the app into a product that could be made available to users other than Ennead and its clients.
“Do we want to give this away, or do we want to make money off it?” Rossant asks, suggesting that Ennead may take an “if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” attitude to software development, which could be more lucrative than just practicing architecture. If so, Ennead will probably create a discrete corporation to develop and sell its campus-planning software. In choosing that route, it would be following a trail blazed by Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake (which offers several apps through its KT Innovations affiliate, owned by the firm’s founding partners) and the Seattle-headquartered NBBJ (which formed a separate company to market a virtual-reality tool)—and, much earlier, by Frank Gehry (whose firm spun off Gehry Technologies with its Digital Project software, in 2002).
You have 0 complimentary articles remaining.
Unlimited access + premium benefits for as low as $1.99/month.