I think about the person standing in the lobby a lot.
They’re not thinking about structural dynamics. They’re not thinking about anemometers or damping systems or counterweight specifications. They’re thinking about the meeting they’re going to be late for. They’re watching the elevator indicator and counting down the seconds. They’re drawing a conclusion about the building they chose to work in – is something broken? Where is the elevator?
That conclusion is often wrong. On most windy days, the building above them is performing exactly as its engineers designed it to. The structural systems are doing their job. There is no reason, at least no structural reason, for them to be standing there.
But the elevator doesn’t know that.
Supertall buildings are among the most carefully engineered structures on earth. They are designed, tested, and specified to handle the wind environments they inhabit. What most people don’t know is that the vertical transportation systems in these buildings are not making decisions based on how the building is moving. They’re making decisions based on wind speed recorded at the rooftop or, commonly, at a local airport. A building handling conditions comfortably and performing exactly as designed can still trigger a wind-induced slowdown.
This challenge has existed since supertalls emerged as a building category. It wasn’t the result of poor decisions. Direct structural measurement at the scale these operations require simply wasn’t available. So, the industry worked with the best information it had. That information is no longer the best available.
RWDI has encountered this problem often over five decades engineering some of the most sophisticated structures on earth. Through this experience, the company has developed deep wind engineering expertise. The kind of expertise that quietly shapes how entire categories of buildings get built. And at some point, it became impossible to ignore the gap between what RWDI knew about how these buildings behave and what the systems operating their elevators were actually using to make decisions.
That’s the problem Ibex exists to solve. Ibex is an elevator motion management system: it measures actual building movement and uses that data to inform elevator decisions in real time. Not only because this is an interesting engineering challenge but because there’s a person in a lobby who shouldn’t be there.
Building operators are in an impossible position right now. When a threshold fires and tenants start calling, they have nothing to stand behind. They can see that conditions outside don’t look alarming. They can observe that the building seems fine. But they have no verified data to support that observation, and no authority to act on it. So, they apologize. They explain that the system responded to wind conditions. And they hope the tenant’s lease isn’t expiring.
In a market where renewals have dropped from 50% of leasing activity in 2023 to just 20% in early 2026, according to CBRE’s 2026 U.S. Office Occupier Sentiment Survey, hope is not a strategy.
What operators need is the ability to say, with confidence and with data: our building is performing as designed, and our vertical transportation reflects that. Uptime is not a technical nicety. It’s a necessity.
Ibex gives operators that ability. When the building is fine, the elevators know it. When a response is genuinely warranted during a wind event, it’s grounded in structural reality rather than a proxy for it.
The person in the lobby is still waiting. They shouldn’t have to.