EXTENSIVE AV COMPLEMENTS NAR'S "GREEN" HQ

EXTENSIVE AV COMPLEMENTS NAR'S "GREEN" HQ - Page 3

Glass, Ship-Shaped Challenges

Our AV tour of the Realtor Building will feature the boardroom, VTC room and event rooms, as well as the help desk. All AV installed rooms have Crestron control. Although the building was an architectural showpiece, it also created AV design and install challenges. The dynamic lines of the structure form a ship’s prow, which aims toward the Capitol. Avitecture’s Bill Apter noted that the main conference rooms and the boardroom are located where the building forms a point. “It created an incredible challenge in trying to lay out the room to work for audiovisual. In addition, the walls in the entire building, from floor to ceiling, are glass. There’s only a four-inch base that’s put around each floor for routing of wiring. So there are no walls, except for interior walls.”

He explained that the upfront coordination with the architect for placement of furniture, internal wire routing and camera placement was done primarily by Polysonics. “This was very labor-intensive coordination because there wasn’t the luxury we had in other AV situations. All the plates and wiring from point A to point B had to be pre-determined and sized specifically to handle whatever cabling had to go to a particular table or credenza. So we wound up putting a lot of equipment into custom credenzas, which were sized to hold the racks.”

"Reverse Build"

He continued, “It was sort of a reverse build. We knew how large the racks had to be; therefore, we made the credenzas to that size. Then, inside the credenzas, we brought power, cooling, LAN and cable TV connections. So there was a lot of upfront coordination required to accommodate this sort of unforgiving space.”

Another challenge was in the GUI selection. Avitecture supplied samples and Polysonics narrowed down the selection to three GUI layouts. Factors considered were aesthetics, functionality and layout. The least amount of page flips was a consideration, as well. “Polysonics’ Steve Boudreau was a superb designer who stayed with the project through all the changes,” affirmed Apter. “He took over in midstream and really helped us iron out the difficulties that the building provided, itself.”

According to Apter, one of the real strengths of Avitecture is that programmers know how to write programs for end users who are scared of AV. Every AV room has a step-by-step control system screen layout. “A strength of Avitecture/AV Washington is that we’ve developed a touchscreen protocol that really ‘walks’ people through their system operation with a combination of graphic layout and text,” he said. “That’s because touchscreens scare people. It’s the ‘Oh my! I’m going to press this and the wrong thing is going to work’ scenario. So our company does presentation spaces for non- AV end users.”

AV rooms are equipped with a full Crestron, with either a wired touchpanel or a wireless two-way system. And there’s a drama behind the two-way, which now functions quietly and dependably. But it wasn’t always like that. Apter noted that Crestron, on its own, developed a newer wireless technology because downtown DC is so very heavy with wireless that frequencies were jammed up. Although it was through no fault of Crestron that the initial two-way wouldn’t work in this environment, the company agreed to put in, at great expense, its newly developed 2.4 spread spectrum, two-way wireless that wasn’t in the consultant’s original spec.

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