Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.
There's so much external construction to just building the house that drives up cost and drags on efficiency: sewers, electric, water mains, grading, roads/driveways, sidewalks, curbs permitting, etc. It's pretty easy to prebuild framing sections and raise them on-site (or prebuild the whole house and ship it but I hate how those oversize haulers tie up traffic and are you really saving much by having to ship something that way?). The only thing that comes to mind are those screw-in pilings: I've seen them used for large garages and other outbuildings...could these replace the typical concrete foundation (aka pier and beam without the perimeter concrete stem wall) and increase speed of construction?
Excellent!
Great article!
I love how you start with a huge dataset, sorting each innovation useful categories, and then following up with interesting examples with photos.
There's so much external construction to just building the house that drives up cost and drags on efficiency: sewers, electric, water mains, grading, roads/driveways, sidewalks, curbs permitting, etc. It's pretty easy to prebuild framing sections and raise them on-site (or prebuild the whole house and ship it but I hate how those oversize haulers tie up traffic and are you really saving much by having to ship something that way?). The only thing that comes to mind are those screw-in pilings: I've seen them used for large garages and other outbuildings...could these replace the typical concrete foundation (aka pier and beam without the perimeter concrete stem wall) and increase speed of construction?
Cool one!
One may also posit a framework for workflows primed for automation.
I tried here: https://gabrieletinelli.substack.com/p/everyone-wants-to-invest-in-robotics?r=rizvz&utm_medium=ios