But this heads-up thinking comes at an upfront price, and until recently most landlords have not been willing to take the lead. In Europe and Asia smart buildings are fairly common, but the concept is only just starting to percolate in North America. 
    "The second big revolution in building design—after the skyscraper—was in the 1960s when the Toronto TD Centre Phase One was built incorporating air conditioning," said Dermot Sweeny, of Sweeny, Sterling Finlayson and Co. Architects, the design architects and green-building advisors on the Toronto Telus Tower, an 800,000-square-foot, 30-storey building which is shaping up to be a showcase of modern building system technology. "Until then, if things got too hot in a building you just opened a window. Then we started building these hermetically sealed buildings and we needed to move more and more air through to cool them, while at the same time adding more and more office technology like computers, fax machines and copiers, which just created more heat."
    It’s obviously counterproductive, Sweeny said, but trying to change that paradigm has been an uphill battle because the North American commercial real estate market tends to pass costs on to tenants, who have little choice but to pay.
    Things are changing, though, Sweeny said, as tenants like Telus express their brands through their corporate headquarters. Like the air conditioning revolution of the ’60s, once the marketplace sees the value in intelligent building design, others will follow.
    Microsoft Canada’s Mississauga, Ont., head office, for example, broke with traditional design when it opened in 2002. "They had a set of standards for buildings which they developed and wanted to stick with," Sweeny said of the high-tech smart building which features glass curtain walls with natural light through 85 per cent of the floor, no glare, a raised floor for under-foot air circulation, and more flexibility when moving workstations, on top of wireless connectivity inside and out. "They took the risk, and now it’s setting the standard for Microsoft buildings."
    In planning its 690,000-square-foot corporate headquarters in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba Hydro knew taking the lead in energy-efficient building design wasn’t just an extension of its brand and marketing plan, it also had to make dollars and sense. 
    "We had to know it wasn’t going to impact rates for our customers," said Tom Gouldsborough of Manitoba Hydro, one of the managers on the project.
    The building, which will house about 1,800 employees when it opens in the Fall of 2007, had to span the swings of Winnipeg’s climate: from the brutal minus 35 degrees Celcius of winter to the egg-frying 35 degrees Celcius in summer, while still cutting energy consumption by 60 per cent compared to an average building of the same size.
    They’ve done it, said Gouldsborough, at least on paper, by tapping in to the earth itself. A giant 114-metre atrium in the building will act like a fireplace flue, allowing the sun to heat up a thermal mass at the top which then draws fresh, cool air in from the ground. This lets air circulate by convection, not the force of electric fans. Natural sunlight also permeates most of the floors while automatic shades deploy and windows open to block glare and introduce outside air.
    For cooling and heating, 280 five-inch diameter holes were bored vertically some 380 feet below the structure and will be used to pump a refrigerant liquid through a loop. It will take heat from the building in the summer and store it underground in the natural aquifer for use in the winter when it can be re-circulated though pipes in the exposed ceilings to heat the buildings. In winter the process will be reversed.
    And while a great deal of technology is required to drive these complex systems, the additional controls add only about 10 per cent to capital costs, Gouldsborough said, and over the life cycle of the building that will be easily recouped.