Construction Employment Is At Its Lowest Level Since 1946(theatlantic.com) |
Construction Employment Is At Its Lowest Level Since 1946(theatlantic.com) |
A truck will drive up to the site with a stack of lumber on it. Workers will individual measure, cut, and fit the pieces together. Wiring is all eyeballed by the electrian, and custom fit. The same for plumbing. Finish carpentry is all done piece by piece, by skilled craftsmen, and all hand fitted (and are a huge component of the expense of a house).
It all seems ripe for a revolution.
I'm not suggesting that houses be all cookie-cutter identical. But a custom design could largely be built in a factory, trucked in, and then you'd just have final assembly done on site. The result would be higher quality and lower cost (and less labor).
You can see some of this with roof trusses today, which are custom built in a factory and then trucked to the site.
There are numerous problems with innovation in construction -- building codes and trade union resistance being two of them. Building codes are often written in such a way as to exclude nonstandard materials altogether. "Component X must be made of 2x6 lumber" (a "prescriptive" building code) rather than "component X must be capable of withstanding a load of Y pounds with a safety factor of Z" (a "performance" building code). An advantage of that is that building inspectors don't have to be engineers. The disadvantage is that it's hard/expensive/impossible to do something that isn't in the book.
Another problem is that there's still something of a "trailer park" stigma associated with prefab construction.
I seem to recall footage of a building-erecting robot in Japan. Basically it was a frame that went up and down on four pillars, with an armature that could move in two dimensions on the frame, almost like a "UFO catcher" or crane game machine.
(Some offsite automation like bringing in pre built roof supports or foundation forms makes sense, but that is already happening.)
On the commercial side, unions are heavily entrenched. You absolutely can not build a sky scraper without heavy involvement from the metal workers trade union, the electricians union, etc. There is a lot of waste there.
I could see automation on the commercial side, but not really on the residential side.
Also working against you - construction workers are cheap right now. The unemployement is due to lack of demand, not the cost of building. We can't even fill already built buildings.
less snarky answer: mobile/prefab homes are more common where the land is cheap, and places where a lot of people live, the land isn't cheap. I've never seen one where you can't tell (or have I?!? but seriously, probably not,) but I've been living in the city for years.
But I see no fundamental reason why this must be true. Automation in every other industry increases quality, and certainly predictability. In current home construction, quality varies erratically all over the place, even in the same home, even in expensive homes.
From my perspective as a residential carpenter I see a continuing decline in the cost of labor combined with increases in efficiency due to new materials and equipment. Combine that with the high price of land in most urban areas, and I don't see much incentive for the big home builders to push manufactured homes and on-site automated fabrication.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-31/canadian-building-j...