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Architects Steve Kieran and James Timberlake use technology transfer to rewrite the laws of conventional wisdom in design and construction.

Continuing Education Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article. Learning Objective: After reading this article, you will be able to: 1. Describe how technology transfer works. 2. Explain how technology transfer can benefit architecture. 3. Describe unitized construction.

What is technology transfer? The term has been around for 30 years in the automotive and aerospace industries and, more recently, in university research quarters. In the broadest terms, technology transfer is the passing along of information, prototypes, processes, and inventions from one specialized industrial sector to another for the purpose of commercialization and dissemination to a larger consumer base.

Rendering courtesy Kiernan Timberlake Associates The facade for the Melvin and Claire Levine Hall at the University of Pennsylvania is a factory-made, pressure-equalized, double-glazed unit.

Actually, technology transfer is an industry in and of itself. Most universities and their faculty benefit from royalties received when they license their inventions to manufacturers of everything from medical devices to home furnishings. At the Marshall Space Flight Center’s Technology Transfer Department (www.nasasolutions.com), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has an entire program devoted to finding commercial applications for its inventions and innovations and publishes a journal called Spinoff (www.sti.nassa.gov/tto), which reports annually on those NASA technologies that have been successfully transferred to the private sector. The built environment has benefited a great deal from aerospace inventions, although most architects would be hard-pressed to name any. (See sidebar, page 138).

Historically, the architectural profession has been the passive recipient of innovation, because new methods and materials have flowed in only one direction: from inventor to manufacturer to designer. The profession’s apparent indifference to innovation in other fields and the decentralized nature of the design and construction industries has hindered architects creatively and kept builders lagging decades behind other industries that manufacture products as well as provide services. Yet, there is recent evidence that practicing architects and even architecture students [“Weird Science in a New Age of Industry,” record, April 2001, p.163] are getting their hands dirty, at least figuratively, in the newly hip fields of materials science and product development. Specifically, two Philadelphia architects have embarked on an ambitious project to prove that buildings can be built faster, cheaper, and better by borrowing not just the materials but the processes from other industries. In their case, the role model is the automotive industry.