Technology alters office building designs.

FAR NORTH DALLAS - The pace of technological advances in computer software doubles every year, the experts say.

Commercial building designers, meanwhile, use essentially the same structural framing systems the Parthenon's contractors had.

That's not to say today's technology isn't changing commercial building design it is, and drastically at that.

It's just moving at a slower, statelier pace.

Architect and innovator R. Buckminster Fuller once said that "Technology develops at a speed relative to the parts which move within the technology."

Thus computers and airplanes see rapid advances, while, as most understand, buildings don't move very fast.

Or, as one Dallas architect put it, "It's about evolution, not revolution."

Don Powell, principal at Dallas architecture firm Haldeman-Powell+Partners, said there haven't been a lot of quantum leaps in the past 20 years.

For instance, Powell said, historically the core-to-glass column-free range topped at 40 feet.

Today, architects have pushed that limit back to 47 feet.

"That's a 15 to 18% change," Powell said. "It's a relatively minor one."

Even so, architects say, while outside construction hasn't changed that much, there have 'been some pretty radical changes inside the skin. …