What do 583 Broadway, 585 Broadway, and 158 Mercer Street have in common? They’re all the same building. No big surprise, since any building that covers multiple original-plan lots will have multiple addresses. The surprise was to find out that the six projects we’ve had at that building have been named after all three of those addresses.
OSE’s relationship to building records is a little different than if we were designing new buildings. We don’t just need them to know what our work was, we need as much information as we can get because (a) gathering information about a building is part of every project we work on and (b) we often end up going back to the same buildings again and again. Sometimes, it’s a long time between projects at a building. For example, we worked at 660 Park Avenue in 2006, and again in 2019. There are a couple of buildings where our first and most recent projects are thirty years apart. We are more efficient if we have, readily at hand, the information from our past projects. And in this case, efficiency helps both us and our clients.
In some ways, this is easy. We switched to a cloud server in 2018, which was fortunate timing since it made the switch to working from home during Covid and hybrid since Covid much easier. And we finished scanning all of our paper project records to the server last year. So everything is now available in one place, if we can find it.
The first step is some form of database – keeping in mind that a card catalog is a database, so really I just mean a comprehensive index – linking our project numbers (the basis of organization of our project records) to individual buildings. It looks like the simplest way to do this without getting tripped up by buildings with multiple addresses or names is the basic organization used by the Department of Buildings and other city agencies: borough, block, and lot. As discussed last week, knowing the lot number doesn’t automatically mean you know which building you’re talking about, because there are many examples of multiple buildings on a single lot. But, as also discussed last week, we’re relying on people rather than AI, so if it takes 30 seconds of actual human thought to parse the block and lot to a specific building, that’s okay.
Tomorrow: once you’ve IDed the building, what next?
You must be logged in to post a comment.