NEW TECHNOLOGIES:
How will they redefine the architectural,
engineering and construction community?
By Mark Buckshon
North Carolina Construction Report staff writer
Is the U.S. design and construction industry about to
experience a radical, transformative and critical techno-
logical revolution?
The answer, according to some industry leaders, is
“yes” - as the industry’s inefficiencies and intermediary-
loaded framework experiences stress as owners press
for greater efficiencies and disruptive integrated organi-
zations are changing the meanings of modular design-
build to much more comprehensive and wide-scale
applications. To learn more about where the industry is heading, I
accepted a media invitation to attend the TECH+ Confer-
ence in Manhattan in May, sponsored by the The Archi-
tect’s Newspaper.
During the day-long event, several speakers outlined
critical issues, including collaboration/BIM, sustainability
and visualization, as a variety of industry technology busi-
nesses demonstrated their products and services.
Several speakers observed that the AEC industry is
near the bottom of the bell curve in technological adapta-
tion, only slightly better than architecture.
Perhaps the biggest “wow” moment occurred for me
when Chris Meyer, Boston-based general contractor Suf-
folk’s chief information officer, displayed a graph show-
ing the sudden and dramatic market decline for
newspaper advertising in the last decade. We’ve pub-
lished stories about Suffolk’s multi-city Smart Lab con-
cept, but I didn’t connect the dots until his speech that
Meyer had previously been the Boston Globe’s publisher.
This graph shows the incredible and sudden decline in newspaper advertis-
ing revenue correlated with Google and Facebook’s rise. https://charman-an-
derson.com/2016/09/28/us-newspapers-lost-advertising-revenue-found/ 6 — Summer 2018 — The North Carolina Construction News
Meyer displayed a graph that showed that, while the
newspaper industry was well aware of the Internet’s rise
and developed different models to cope with the
change, it could not stop the steep and dramatic crash
that started about the turn of the millennium, as Google
and Facebook grabbed most of the advertising market. In
fact, newspaper advertising revenue has declined by
about four-fifths in the past decade, so advertising rev-
enues are now even lower than they were in the 1950s.
Newspaper digital sales have made the slightest gain;
but the data is clear – the conventional newspaper indus-
try has been pushed over the cliff, and in just a few
years. Meyer suggested that AEC, like the newspaper busi-
ness, is an “intermediary” industry – that is, most practi-
tioners are serving others in the value chain rather than
end users - and he suggested this could create a situa-
tion where there will be major disruptions as new tech-
nologies capture market presence and share.
Will this happen anytime soon? That is the big ques-
tion. And the AEC industry may be saved (or ultimately
destroyed) by its current structure, where various profes-
sionals often work in their own silos.
Keynote speaker Dennis Sheldon, director of the Digi-
tal Building Laboratory (DBL) at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, shared some insights into the challenges
(and opportunities) that the technology creates for link-
ages and collaboration between the various AEC indus-
tries, including BIM, virtual and augmented reality.
Meanwhile, Phil Bernstein, the associate dean at the
Yale School of Architecture, said current trends suggest
big data, computational design and integrating machine
learning could “eventually help architects design more
optimized buildings and reduce the waste that comes
when expectations don’t line up with how a building actu-
ally performs in the real world,” The Architect’s Newspa-
per reported.
But BIM and virtual reality have been around for sev-
eral years now, and while they have certainly influenced
design and construction practices, they haven’t changed
the universe, it seems. Something else needs to give –
and the suggestion from some speakers is that it will
come from highly capitalized new integrated industry or-
ganizations, and individual owners demanding greater
technological adaptation and accountability.
The disruptors, such as Katerra, combine modular/fac-
tory building with a beginning-to-end design, engineering
and construction collaboration process, meaning that the
owner places the order, architects and engineers (often in
remote locations), prepare the design, and the work is
scheduled in factory settings, with modular components
shipped to the actual construction site for rapid assem-
bly. If these services catch on – and billions of dollars in in-
vestment capital have been staked on the proposition –
the traditional design and construction model will be up-
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