New technologies:
How will they redefine the
architectural, engineering
and construction community?
Mark Buckshon, Canadian Design and Construction Report
Is the Canadian design and construction industry
about to experience a radical, transformative and critical
technological 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. Not surprisingly, many of these changes are being led
by U.S.-based organizations, though there are significant
areas including artificial intelligence (machine learning)
where Canadians have a leadership role.

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. (In exchange for a secondary media
sponsorship status, we received an attendee pass, but I
paid my own travel and accommodation costs.)
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 and
Suffolk’s chief information officer, displayed a graph
showing the sudden and dramatic market decline for
newspaper advertising in the last decade. We’ve pub-
lished a story in our U.S. publications about Suffolk’s
multi-city Smart Lab concept, but I didn’t connect the
dots until his speech that Meyer had previously been the
Boston Globe’s publisher.

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
8 – Spring 2018 — The Canadian Design and Construction Report