Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 885

Over the winter I visited BMW World, and its neighboring museum, in Munich, Germany. I loved seeing how the company got its start and how far it has come since it helped to invent the automobile at the beginning of the 20th century. I think their first product was actually an airplane engine. But you and I both know that the paradigm is changing. The internal combustion engine (ICE) is going away and pretty soon we won't be driving, so much as being driven around by our cars. Bloomberg recently published an interesting article about this shift and about BMW. Here is an excerpt:

The fact that both combustion engines and electric motors find themselves inside the same 18,000-person complex in Dingolfing, BMW’s largest in Europe, makes it a microcosm of a shift overtaking automakers the world over. A visitor can see that 625-horsepower engine—more than twice as powerful as the original from 1985, a luxury product relentlessly branded as “the ultimate driving machine”—then walk around the corner and see its puny electric replacement. You start thinking the better slogan might be “the ultimate combustion engine.” As in: last of its kind.

Electric motors are a hell of a lot simpler to manufacture (and service) than gasoline engines. BMW estimates that they take about 30% less time to make. So the impacts of this transformation span everything from supply chain to human capital. Today, about 10% of the work that goes on in Dingolfing is related to electric vehicles.

I was reading today about how DroneBase has partnered with FLIR Systems to offer infrared and thermal imaging missions. FLIR actually invested in DroneBase. For those of you who aren't familiar with DroneBase, they operate the largest drone network in the world and have a wide variety of services geared toward the real estate industry.

This news is noteworthy because infrared thermography cameras allow you to see and measure the thermal energy emitted from objects -- such as buildings. For the real estate industry, or even for individual homeowners, it would allow you to quickly visualize things like leakiness (lack of air tightness), water damage, and so on.

These kinds of scans already exist, but putting thermal sensors on drones has the potential to make this technology much more scalable and cost effective. I am sure we will be seeing more of this. And when we do, I bet we'll discover that many buildings don't actually perform all that well from an energy standpoint.

Photo by Goh Rhy Yan  on  Unsplash

Curbed has a section on their website dedicated to "deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning." It is called Longform . And they have some great stories, including this one on " the female powerhouse [ Florence Casler ] who developed 1920s Downtown LA ."

Florence was born in 1869 in Welland, Ontario, about 25 kilometers south of Niagara Falls. She married an American -- a plumber -- and eventually settled in Buffalo, New York. After her husband left to pursue riches in the gold mines, she became a licensed plumber and took over the business.

Eventually this love of plumbing grew into a love of building, and somehow she found herself, with her daughters, in Los Angeles at the beginning of the 20th century.

By the 1920s, she had become a dominant force in the real estate business. Some 60 buildings are credited to Florence and she is thought to be largely responsible for ushering in a new era of multifamily apartments in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, many of her buildings have since been demolished.

As one of the first women in Los Angeles to head a development and/or construction business, I think this is a wonderful story worth telling. For the full Curbed article, click here .