How to Bring Construction into the Future

By: Massimiliano Moruzzi

When it comes to building a bridge, what prevents it from having the most enduring and sustainable life span? What is its worst enemy? The answer is, simply, the bridge itself—its own weight.

Built with today’s construction processes, bridges and buildings are so overly massed with energy and material that they’re inherently unsustainable. While concrete is quite literally one of the foundations of modern construction, it’s not the best building material. It’s sensitive to pollution. It cracks, stains, and collapses in reaction to rain and carbon dioxide. It’s a dead weight: Take San Francisco’s sinking, leaning Millennium Tower as an example.

Modern, smart construction can and will do better. A convergent set of technologies will soon radically change how the construction industry builds and what it builds with.

A holistic shift toward new materials, additive manufacturing, robotics, and a new generation of synthetic brains (including FPGAs, aka Field Programmable Gate Array devices) will drive innovative “construction workcells”—automated manufacturing ecosystems that will use robotics to build smart surfaces, objects, and even buildings. Combining these four forces will drive the construction industry through a sea change, enabling smarter and more sustainably built cities.

Imagine construction robots having the intelligence to infuse smart functionality into building material. Say, for example, you’re sitting in a room that feels too hot. It’s unresponsive to your discomfort; it can’t gauge what you want, and the temperature won’t change until you turn down the thermostat. But if the room is built with a smart composite material, the wall acts more like a skin that can sense your mood and react to you.

A smart bridge or road can mean multiple things. It can be smart because Internet of Things (IoT) technology enables it to be responsive. Or it can be smart because it’s sustainable, perhaps constructed with an advanced weave of natural and engineered fibers instead of concrete and rebar.

Achieving responsiveness requires embedding multifunctionality into the bridge or the road. Wouldn’t it be way more efficient to 3D print a channel of wire into a bridge beam rather than add an external wire as a secondary process in construction? Why not integrate the functionality into one process?

Read More >> https://www.archdaily.com/899482/how-to-bring-construction-into-the-future