Tom Scarangello.
Tom Scarangello
Managing principal and senior adviser at Thornton Tomasetti
New York has started a big push to try to remove the thousands of scaffoldings shading the city’s streets quicker by re-evaluating the law that requires building inspections every five years — a big reason for the lingering sheds.
And the New York City Department of Buildings tapped global architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firm Thornton Tomasetti and T2D2, which last year spun out of the firm’s tech incubator TTWiiN, to help. The city’s looking to see if T2D2, which uses drones to monitor facade deterioration, could help avoid the need to put up scaffolding for buildings not deemed a safety risk.
“It wasn’t until recently that you could really do these kinds of inspections without putting up a scaffolding,” Thornton Tomasetti’s Tom Scarangello said. “That, hopefully, streamlines the process, and also just rewards owners who are actually maintaining their buildings.”
But that wasn’t the only win for Thornton Tomasetti and the dozens of proptech firms it’s incubated or invested in through both TTWiiN and AEC Angels — which it launched with other industry leaders. Robotic window cleaner Skyline Robotics, which AEC Angels backed, debuted in August by cleaning its first skyscraper, the 45-story 1133 Avenue of the Americas.
Scarangello said that Thornton Tomasetti early on embraced proptech, taking a top-down approach in thinking about how to solve the biggest problems in the AEC industry first, and then finding the tech solution to make the fix. And, while the firm’s investment into the companies is “modest,” it serves more as a seal of approval for other AEC companies to embrace the tech, Scarangello said.
Continuing with its pioneering approach, the firm embraced artificial intelligence early on. It recently used AI to scrub the emails of one of its experts, Mike DeLashmit, to create a chatbot to field many of the questions DeLashmit answered on a daily basis.
The goal was to help clear DeLashmit’s plate. He died six months ago after a brief illness, though was able to test out the bot first. DeLashmit gave it a 4.8 out of 5, Scarangello said.
