The immense construction industry – with annual expenditures of more than a trillion dollars in the US alone (projected to be $1.5 trillion by 2022) – has bounced back from the fallow years of the Global Financial Crisis and now represents 4.3 percent of the US GDP.
The industry has also found itself in a brave new world of possibilities thanks to digital and robotic advances unimaginable even a decade ago. With the value of US private construction reaching almost $900 billion in 2016, you’d think construction would be first in line to leverage the time and cost savings of the newest technologies, but engineer and architect Lauren Vasey is well-acquainted with the roadblocks.
“Everyone wants the construction industry to be more digital, but there are so many barriers,” she says. “There’s this compartmentalization of processes and of the entities that go into making a building, like the contractors, designers, and fabricators. They don’t have a digital workflow between them, and there’s no feedback between the various components.”
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