Facilities @ Management

2.28 My Episode with Facility Management

Rainer Fischbach

Models have always been tools of central importance for planning – not alone in building but in all kinds of endeavors, particularly technical ones. Traditional ones have been two-dimensional-like schematic sketches and drawings as well as three-dimensional made from wood, paper or clay, supplemented by verbal descriptions, lists of materials and tools. It was in the course of the Italian renaissance that the word ›modello‹ assumed the encompassing meaning of a body consisting of all kinds of artefacts created in the process of design to the purpose of specifying a project or product to be realized (Westfehling 1993, pp. 74–97, 124–200). Ensuing was the standardization of a variety of drawing kinds and scales, tailored to the needs of particular technical disciplines.

At the turn from the 1970s to the 1980s this century-old state of affairs was to change significantly: not only that reasonably priced computing equipment based on microelectronics became available, but there happened also a burst of new software development aimed at the expanding markets created thereby. Not less significant was the new environment of digital communication developing in the 1980s due to the same advances in microelectronics and the TCP/IP protocol suite released out of the military research establishment of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) into the public sphere and giving rise to the Internet.

The IGP Institut für ...