A new eco-city island near Istanbul designed by Dror Benshetrit of Studio Dror.  More info here and here.



HavvAda Island from Dror on Vimeo.

Making Value: Integrating Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation to Thrive in the Changing Global Economy

Making Value:

Integrating Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation to Thrive in the Changing Global Economy

A free 48-page pdf report from a conference held in Washington, DC on June 11-12th, 2012.

A great report, now to apply these ideas to the change-resistant construction industry.

MIT Conference - The Future of Manufacturing in the U.S. - and the Future of Architecture, Engineering and Construction

On May 8-9th, 2012 MIT hosted an event on "The Future of Manufacturing in the U.S."

Here is a list of the speakers with links to their video presentations.

Below is a video of Rodney Brooks with an overview of manufacturing and technology.



It begs the question, will we always manufacture most homes on site by hand?

Global Construction to grow from a $7.2 trillion market to $12 trillion by 2020

Interesting metrics from Oxford Economics.

Watch the video here.

Frank Gehry on Building Information Modeling

"Ahead of the Curve," Frank Gehry on technology and the future of the building industry in the Financial Times. Great article and an interesting quote, "The next generation of architects is going to draw right on the machine, I am obsolete."

Build the home of your dreams hands free, from your hands to our factory.

We have been building the back end for this project for years and have decided to finally release an alpha version video.   Updates soon.

Bruce Sterling at Wired magazine posted the video here and is driving more traffic.  He referred to it as weird, we think it is exciting.  Wait until you see verion 2, 3, 4, etc.

The MacLeamy Curve - Real World BIM and IPD.

The MacLeamy Curve is often referred to in discussions about building information modeling and ingtegrated project delivery. MacLeamy refers to Patrick MacLeamy, CEO of HOK. While more than one person claims the credit for having developed similar graphs and ideas, Patrick has continually demonstrated leadership in actually applying the ideas. He also created a very good video series on "The Future of The Building Industry" which I highly recommend. Patrick is also a strong advocate for interoperability and is the International Chair for buildingSMART. The image makes obvious what many of us in the business know both intuitively and from years of painful personal experience - the entire process in architecture, engineering and construction is broken and inefficient.

As the architects Kieran and Timberlake make clear in this quote from their book, Refabricating Architecture,

"The single most devastating consequence of modernism has been
the embrace of a process that segregates designers from makers:
The architect has been separated from the contractor, and the
materials scientist has been separated from the product engineer."

by integrating design with fabrication and construction, the improvements in efficiency and predictability can be extreme. So why isn't it happening?

Combine these inefficiencies with dropping productivity in the building industry, clearly illustrated in the chart below by Dr. Paul Teicholz of Stanford's CIFE, and one wonders why the industry refuses to evolve.


















Our work is focused on applying a fully integrated design-fabricate-build process. This is rarely even discussed and certainly almost never applied. To better define the process I often refer people this definition of fabrication information modeling as defined by Acecad/Strucad (recently acquired by Trimble).

Rather than waste more time endlessly discussing the inefficiencies of the industry, why don't do change by demonstrating what is possible on real building projects?