MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

65 words :: MJ Castor The construction industry is notoriously slow to change, but big data is everywhere now—and when it comes to capturing key information on exactly how your home (or school or hospital) came together, the industry leader is Multivista, a local company with ski bum roots. In the late 1990s, Luis Pascual was an electrician living in his pop-top Volkswagen van and skiing all winter. “I had wired a baseboard heater into my van and would plug in at the jobsites and just live there, so it was quite comfortable,” he says. Living on the jobsite, hiking for his turns, and working on the big hotels being built at the “new” Whistler Creekside, Pascual began to notice inefficiencies in the process. “A lot of the time my work, or the work of the plumber or another trade, would get inadvertently boarded over with drywall, and we’d have to tear down a brand new wall to find or fix something.” Pascual was reminded of this waste of time and materials a few months later when his work as a maintenance manager required him to, again, tear down entire walls to find and fix a small issue in a precise location. “Between doing maintenance and having to cut holes everywhere to find things, or being called back to tear open the walls of custom homes I’d wired—that was the genesis,” Pascual says. “I figured there had to be a way to make a permanent record so guys like me don’t have to go around cutting holes everywhere to find work we’ve already done.” By this point, digital cameras were available but Pascual knew that keeping thousands of photographs of construction sites on hard drives was impractical, given how long it would take to find the right image. The photos would only work if they were tied to a digital version of the building’s floor plans, making it easy to locate the image of the exact spot. It was time to call in a tech genius. Luckily Pascual’s high school windsurfing buddy, Graham Twigg, was an aeronautical engineer studying in Vancouver at the time. “Luis always had entrepreneurial ideas that didn’t work,” Twigg says. “He’d say things like, ‘I am gonna drill holes in river rocks and sell them as climbing holds’ and I would be the cynic asking questions about how long it took to do that, or how much it costs to ship rocks around the world. But with this, it wasn’t a terrible idea. I told him to give me a week—I didn’t really know how to program it but I was an arrogant engineer back then—we made something simple, tested it out, and pretty soon we had the first Multivista Documentation System.” “I had a lot of ideas and I knew I would embarrass myself the least with Graham,” Pascual says. “My motto at the time was ‘Graham will figure it out.’ And he did.” Multivista works like this: a trained specialist comes to a jobsite at pre-arranged key milestones—before a concrete slab is poured, or before the drywall goes up—and photographs everything. The overlapping photos are then uploaded to an interactive floorplan that can be used by owners, architects, general contractors, MOUNTAIN HOMES BUILD SMART With Whistler roots, a local technology company is helping shape the future of construction “A lot of the time my work, or the work of the plumber or another trade, would get inadvertently boarded over with drywall, and we’d have to tear down a brand new wall to find or fix something.” A Multivista drone over a Squamish construction site. FEET BANKS