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Webcams offer new views
of campus construction
In the time-lapse video documenting the construction of William R. Greiner Hall on the North Campus, big rigs and portable cranes zoom in and out of the concrete lot surrounding the rising edifice. Shadows lengthen and then shorten again, with each day captured in seconds. Night falls. A few more moments pass, and then the sun comes up again. And, over time, UB’s newest student housing structure takes shape before the eye of the camera.
The Greiner Hall webcam is one of six at the university generating images or recordings available online. The most popular, by far, is a live stream of a South Campus peregrine falcon nest whose stars include three chicks that have hatched and grown into puff-balls over a few weeks. But while the Falcon Cam is getting all the publicity, five other cameras are clicking away every day, chronicling the building and renovation of facilities.
By giving donors and members of the public an opportunity to view real-time progress on projects, the photographs and movies support the university’s UB 2020 long-range plan, which calls for campus expansions and improvements.
“One of the primary things that we try to do is make the connection between planning and implementation,” says Bradshaw Hovey, staff to the campus architect. “A lot of times, people think of those as two separate things. But planning and implementation are part of a continuous process. What better way to update people on our progress than to actually show them what’s happening? People can look day after day and see what the progress is.”
The first UB webcams went up in summer of 2008, says John Pfeffer, service area leader of Instructional Technology Support Services. Trained on Founders Plaza on the North Campus and John and Editha Kapoor Hall on the South Campus, the devices showed rehabilitation projects under way at those two sites. (The Founders Plaza project is complete, and there is no longer a camera operating there.)
Today, other cameras show work at the 134,000-square-foot School of Engineering and Applied Sciences building under construction on the North Campus, and the 10-story UB and Kaleida Health global vascular institute and research building, a downtown project that includes UB’s Clinical and Translational Research Center and the UB Biosciences Incubator. At Harriman Quad on the South Campus, a webcam enables the contractor in charge of upgrading and beautifying that space with sustainable landscaping to monitor developments remotely. Pfeffer says another camera will document the construction of a 5,000-panel solar array–a land art installation–on the North Campus by the Melvin H. Baker Chilled Water Plant off Flint Road.
“We’re doing all this massive construction here at UB, and we want the public to come and see what’s going on and how UB is growing,” Pfeffer says. “Once a project’s done, we’ll be able to use the time-lapse file to see how the building was constructed.”
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