29 April 2020 – The world as we know it has changed dramatically over the past few months with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has challenged us to think and act differently, particularly about how we design and construct buildings that provide essential services – faster and more safely.

Peter Greaves, Buildings of the Future Leader with international engineering, design and advisory company, Aurecon, believes this raises the question of whether the ‘burning platform’ has finally arrived to transform the way we design and construct buildings going forward.

“In the past few months, we have seen a prefabricated hospital for 1000 patients built in 10 days in Wuhan, China, and an exhibition centre in London converted into a 4000-patient hospital in just nine days,” Greaves says.

“Around the world, the construction of hospital intensive care units and associated facilities are being fast-tracked. 

“Add to this the fact that digital infrastructure is also being accelerated to support new ways of working and living from home.

“All this construction activity has had to occur at a rapid pace, in some cases using only 50 per cent of the workforce on-site due to social distancing,” he said.

“It has brought to the fore the use of prefabrication and modularisation, which, along with other industrialised construction methodologies such as 3D printing, robotics and automation, have been around for some time, yet, haven’t been used extensively across our built environment.

“But is that about to change for good?”

Will our buildings of the future be productised?

In Aurecon’s latest Buildings of the Future paper – Why haven’t buildings become productised?, the question is asked as to why industrialised construction hasn’t happened faster and more broadly, and what needs to occur to create a burning platform for innovation to emerge.

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