William L. Porter, the Muriel and Norman Leventhal Professor of Architecture and Planning, is one of six editors of a comprehensive new handbook offering the best practices for commercial, industrial and institutional facilities engineering and management.
The 1,450-page book, Facilities Engineering and Management Handbook: Commercial, Industrial and Institutional Buildings (McGraw-Hill) includes a CD-ROM on facilities asset management worth $500.
"The professions of facilities management and engineering are developing rapidly but are being pulled in contradictory directions," Professor Porter said. "On the one hand, there's demand for greater competence in increasingly specialized subfields, and on the other hand, there's the need for broad-based thinking that integrates facilities into organizational and business strategy. This handbook should be a useful resource to the professional who must deal with both these pressures for change."
The handbook's process and systems approach is designed for everyday use as a complete desktop reference for facilities executives, managers, consultants, constructors, operators, engineers and designers. Its lifecycle approach "helps you put all relevant issues in context -- cost, durability, maintainability, operability, safety and more -- throughout complex specialized facilities such as hospitals, laboratories, prisons, airports and industrial process plants as well as integrated complexes such as colleges, malls and government installations," said Paul R. Smith, editor in chief. More than 230 authors and reviewers contributed.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 10, 2001.
