Facilities @ Management

1.5 Beginnings

Eric Teicholz

Introduction

Mere chance and pure luck were probably the dominant factors that determined the trajectory of my professional career. For example, it was by chance that I got involved with computer-aided design (CAD) applied to architecture in its infancy in the mid-1960s, and it was luck that I attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge, MA, USA, where much of this graphic technology and architectural research was taking place, although for the most part at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In any case, I stayed in Cambridge after graduating from the GSD and then continued at Harvard to teach and do research and development in CAD, at first in architecture then in facility management (FM) at a time when database technology first enabled building data to be effectively integrated with graphics (which I see as another lucky coincidence).

As an academic (until the early 1980s) I also kept good records of my professional career and my published books and research papers keeping up this habit until about 2010. I thought that perhaps one day someone might be interested in the early days of CAD as it applied to architecture and facility management. Sure enough, a few PhD architecture students recently contacted me about architectural CAD in the 1960s and the GSD library has asked for copies of my early work, research, and publications for archival purposes.

Which brings me to the content of this chapter. I was approached ...