The Challenge of Industrializing a Sector

I was intrigued when I came across the European Union’s (EU) resolutions to address an unprecedented challenge brought on by COVID-19. Well, in fact, there was a precedent: the end of World War II, when the Marshall Plan was approved for Europe’s recovery. After months of an extraordinary lockdown—almost as if trying to avoid the virus’s bombardment—the EU called for a new “Marshall Plan.” This time, it multiplied its resources fivefold, though few people recognized its true significance: resources on the scale of recovering from five world wars. Its main objective was the reindustrialization of the continent.

Reindustrialization is easy to grasp across almost every productive sector, but in our industry, it made no sense. How can we reindustrialize a sector that has never been industrialized? We cannot. What we needed to do was reindustrialize all sectors, and in particular, industrialize the construction industry, which accounts for 8% to 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in any country worldwide. It is the only sector that does not produce its final product in a factory. It is the only sector where everything is produced at the final site. And that is the major transformation it is undergoing: moving from in situ execution to ex situ production—or, if we prefer the English term to the Latin one, to off-site production.

Construction, throughout history, has always been carried out on-site, at the very location where the building, road, or bridge stands. If we examine the history of architecture closely (as Paul Oliver does in his book Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture, 2007), it becomes clear that until nearly the twentieth century, construction depended on local materials and the culture of the area. Only nomadic peoples—nomadic because they were shaped by climate hardships, a connection we still recognize today—built with lightweight, portable elements that could be easily assembled and taken apart.

In terms of transformation, the first requirement is to stop referring simply to the construction sector and instead speak of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) sector, in order to bring together all the participants in the process—adding the architect, engineer, builder, and operator/maintainer into the equation. No one industrializes a process without considering every single phase. In fact, to industrialize is to integrate. And when we integrate everything in a factory, we can say we are dealing with an industrialized process.

But we must first ask ourselves whether it is necessary to industrialize construction. And I would argue that this step is not only necessary, it is indispensable. Why?

Spain needs roughly 170,000 more homes each year than are being built; France needs about 220,000 more, and the United Kingdom around 300,000 more.

Europe as a whole faces a shortfall of 1.4 million homes each year, and it has already been proven that conventional construction cannot fix this problem because the very approach we have been using caused it. As Richard Buckminster Fuller said, to solve a problem, you cannot use the same tools that created it; you need to design a new model that makes the old one outdated.

And this is exactly what Germany and Japan did—curiously, the very countries that lost World War II—through massive industrialization, and today they represent the world’s best and most advanced industrialized construction.

But we have even more reasons to question whether this sector needs to be industrialized. The environmental case is particularly strong: our sector uses the most materials, produces the most CO2 emissions, creates the most waste, and recycles the least. The social case is equally compelling: only 8% of its workers are women in a world aiming for 50/50 parity; people with different abilities or disabilities are largely excluded; work is often performed outdoors regardless of conditions; and the sector has the second-highest accident rate after mining. Is this what we want from a productive industry?

To transform a sector, we must work on two fronts: with current operators and with future ones.

In the first group, we need to transform technical and professional profiles—undertaking an urgent professional reorientation—so they adopt digitalization (let’s call it BIM), organization (let’s call it Lean), and processes (let’s call it industrialization). In the second, we must revise vocational and university curricula so that students internalize these concepts in both mind and practice. Every day that passes adds to the delay in transforming our AECO sector.

We continue laying 26,000 bricks one by one to build a single-family home, while the next 3 billion people expected in 2050 wait for their habitats to be constructed.

Or would it be better to tackle this challenge now, thereby avoiding what will become a major social problem: the lack of housing?

Where can we introduce Artificial Intelligence if we are neither digitized nor industrialized?

The next steps of this transformation will help us define a more precise ecosystem of what the AECO sector needs to align with society’s objectives.

Main image: Cruise terminal at the port of Bilbao, Sergio Baragaño. Photo © Mariela Apollonio