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



Rendering of Google's new Sunnyvale campus (BIG Architects)
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 in-
dustry 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 pro-
fessionals 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 ac-
tually performs in the real world,” The Architect’s News-
paper 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/factory 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 de-
sign, and the work is scheduled in factory settings, with
modular components shipped to the actual construction
site for rapid assembly.

If these services catch on – and billions of dollars in
investment capital have been staked on the proposition
– the traditional design and construction model will be
upended as designers, contractors and subtrades either
need to buy into the new competing mammoth building
organizations, or fight for a shrinking market share
where traditional practices and relationships remain in
place. Another drive for change is happening at the owner-
ship level. Jeremy Munn, a senior capital project man-
ager for the design and construction department within
the facilities division of Northeastern University in
Boston, for example, described how the university is fi-
nally getting all the pieces together in a digital procure-
ment/building cycle, but not by using a one-size fits all
system, and with plenty of training and support to en-
courage compliance (and this progress is coming be-
cause the owner is driving the agenda, not the
architects, engineers or contractors.)
Munn said his department manages 250 new pro-
jects a year, of varying size and complexity, from minor
retrofits to multi-million dollar new structures.

His goal: Build an e-procurement and building system
that has consistent templates, reporting dashboards, au-
The Canadian Design and Construction Report — Spring 2018 – 9