Single Serves ep. 208 - McDade on Planned Building Obsolescence

Clair Marie McDade is an architect and data scientist with extensive experience designing institutional buildings for the public sector. After more than 10 years as a practicing architect, she became frustrated with the seemingly short lifespan of new buildings and decided to investigate the causes of this phenomenon. This resulted in her founding Archneura and creating the Building Quality Index (BQI) as a way to leverage modern data science to enable her customers to make better decisions regarding the building and maintenance of their building stocks.

I wanted to interview Clair Marie because she recently launched a funding campaign* to get her business, Archneura, off the ground and I am a big fan (and early investor) of her invention as it is bringing the operation and maintenance of buildings in the 21st century, with a strong sustainable bent.

This is another example of what innovation can look like for the building industry. While it’s still too early to gauge the success of her offering, I think it’s worth checking on its premise alone: reducing costs and increasing building lifespans while significantly reducing the amount of waste that the builfing industry generates.

 

About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.

Credits: Produced & edited by Révélateur Studio, ©2021