Technology and the Future of the U.S.

Construction Industry

August 1984

NTIS order #PB86-209442

. . . 111

Technology and the

Future of the US

Construction Industry

Congress of the United States Office of

Technology Assessment

Table of Contents

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Technology and the Construction

Industry: An Introduction

Henry Kelly

Computers and Construction

Harry Mileaf

Alton S. Bradford

Smart Office Buildings

Richard Carl Reisman

Michael Clevenger

Piero Patri

Modular Structures and

Related Techniques

Don O. Carlson

Eric Dluhosch

Energy in Buildings

David E. Claridge

John P. Millhone

2

2

12

12

16

30

30

34

40

46

46

70

76

76

80

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Construction Technologies

Richard L. Tucker

Structural Systems

Wendel R. Wendel

Materials

Albert Dietz

Commercial Building Designs

Charles H. Thornton

Over the Horizon

Raymond P. Whitten

Reflections on the Presentations

John P. Eberhard

James Gross

86

86

104

104

124

124

134

134

140

140

144

144

150
iv

Foreword

The American Institute of Architects is pleased to publish this report in cooperation with the Office

of Technology Assessment for the United States Congress.

The OTA panel on technology and the construction industry explored topics such as commercial

building designs, energy use in buildings, and the future utilization of computers in the construction

industry. While not endorsing all the views expressed in the report, the AIA offers the publication to

foster discussion of the construction industry’s future and the critical role of the design professions in

shaping the built environment,

The American Institute of Architects is interested in hearing from readers of this report, and asks

that comments be directed to the Office of the Executive Vice President at the American Institute of

Architects, 1735 New York Avenue, N. W., Washington, D.C. 20006.

John A. Busby Jr., FAIA

President

The American Institute of Architects
Technology and the

Construction Industry:

An Introduction

Henry Kelly

Technology is reshaping the American

economy. Vast improvements in agricultural

and manufacturing productivity have

outstripped demand to the point where net

employment in these areas is falling while

employment in business service professions has

soared. Economic growth has been buoyed by

enormous volumes of sales in office computers,

telecommunication systems, and other products

not even on the market a decade ago. Whether

the rate of change is more or less rapid than it

has been in the past, whether the changes are

evolutionary or revolutionary, is in some ways

not as important as the fact that, taken

together, these changes have dramatically

reshaped the way the economy combines

material, capital, labor, and ideas to provide

most kinds of goods and services. The work

described below was undertaken because the

chairmen of several Congressional committees

asked the U.S. Office of Technology

Assessment (OTA) to describe the way new

technologies are acting to reshape the nation’s

economy. One of the areas chosen for special

attention was the construction industry.

There is a widespread perception that the

technologies that are reshaping most of the rest

of the economy have left the construction

industry behind — that Ramses II would

probably recognize most of the operations in

today’s construction site. Construction is

typically considered a low-technology industry

operating in sheltered local markets with low or

falling productivity. Believing this to be a

mistaken impression, OTA convened a

workshop of experts with direct experience in

construction. The topics were selected after

extensive preliminary discussions with industry

experts who were asked to identify areas where

technology was likely to have its greatest effect

on the industry as a whole: the use of

information technologies; factory construction

techniques; new energy technologies; and new

structural designs. Participants were a diverse

group drawn from industry, academia, and

government. The diversity of the participants

was a reflection of a diverse and decentralized

industry. Many of the participants met each

other for the first time in the workshop even

though they had spent careers studying

different aspects of construction.

The construction industry, of course, is not

really a single industry but a complex cluster of

industries somewhat uncomfortably combined

under a single classification. Residential

construction, commercial buildings, industrial

structures, and civil engineering projects are

typically bundled somewhat uncomfortably

together. Moreover, construction activities

combine a wide range of different professions:

architects; engineers; and specialists in site

work, renovation, and maintenance. Different

teams are formed for new projects. Teams

assembled for major projects often disperse

after the projects are complete. This fluidity

and flexibility makes the industry dynamic,

resourceful, and adaptable. But the diversity

has always frustrated efforts to analyze the net

performance of the industry as a whole. In fact,

several of the workshop participants argued

that while much of the industry’s strength lies

in its flexibility, excessive fragmentation can

also create problems. Often, no one has a

perspective on the construction process

adequate to detect inefficiencies that result

from imperfect coordination among the firms

responsible for construction, or adequate to

combine an analysis of construction decisions

with an analysis of the implications of these

decisions for building operation and facilities

maintenance. The diversity also makes it

difficult to measure progress in the industry

since national economic statistics provide a poor

picture of the diverse enterprises that combine

to make the U.S. construction industry.

We asked the participants to explain how the

technologies they knew best were reshaping the

construction industry, and we asked them to

speculate about the possible impact of the

changes that might result on overall growth

rates in the industry, the quality and

performance of building products, the number

and nature of jobs created by the industry, and

the international competitive position of the
domestic industry. The discussion also

considered areas where optimum

implementation of new technology may require

a review of existing federal, state, and local

policies that are used to regulate the industry.

The policy consequences of new construction

technology will be the subject of a separate

study and are not extensively discussed in this

volume.

The workshop established two points quite

clearly. First, the construction industry is being

reshaped, in some cases radically reshaped, by

new technology — although the changes are

seldom obvious to casual observers. And

second, many attractive new technologies are

being adopted slowly because of the industry’s

fragmented nature, the failure of clients to

demand innovation (due in part to the fact that

they seldom recognize the potential advantages

of new technology), the shortage of research

funding from either public or private sources,

by a regulatory structure poorly adapted to

rapid technical change, and fear of litigation.

Slow rates of adoption of new technologies can

make the industry vulnerable to foreign

competition and rob clients of qualitative

improvements in buildings that could not only

make the building a more attractive place to

work or live, but reduce operating costs as well.

The workshop was organized around the

premise that technology affects the construction

industry in three principal ways: (i) technology

has reshaped the national economy in ways that

affect demand for different kinds of structures;

(ii) technology has changed the nature of the

structure itself (including the services provided

by buildings); and (iii) technology has changed

the way that structures are produced and

erected.

1. Demand

Even if it embraced no new technologies itself, the construction industry would be forced

to change in response to the transformation underway in the the American economy. America

is becoming a nation of office workers. This

means greater emphasis on office structures.

Moreover, the nature of office work is itself

changing in ways that, in turn, are changing the

demands placed on buildings. While we can expect significant growth in the productivity of

production-floor operations, many of the most

dramatic increases in national productivity during the next decade are likely to occur because

of improvements in the technology of office

work. This is as true for sales clerks, hospital

employees, architects, lawyers, and teachers, as

it is for insurance agencies and banks. Offices

are becoming much more heavily capitalized as

word processors and other more sophisticated

computer terminals substitute for routine clerical work. This trend means new office designs

and new demands on the building infrastructure. Moreover, modern communications give

management much greater freedom to choose

locations for ‘back office’ activities and a variety of other functions. There is seldom an absolute need to locate these facilities near central

headquarters buildings or even near the production facilities that they may support. The result

has been a decentralization of operations, suburbanization, and rapid movement toward the

south and west.

We must also consider the dynamics of

change. It is now clear that most buildings will

need to be adapted to a variety of different purposes during their design lives. A fast-paced

economy means increasing need for flexibility

— particularly in office activities where it is

simply impossible to predict what equipment

will dominate ten years from now or, indeed,

what equipment will be available next year.

This means that structures dedicated to a single

purpose, and structures that cannot be upgraded to accommodate modern communication

systems and energy efficiency technologies, are

increasingly unattractive investments. Some of

the members of the workshop, most prominently Wendel R. Wendel, argued that we

should try to move away from the notion that

buildings are permanent monuments and recognize that the provision of shelter is a service —
Technology and the Construction Industry

a service that should be tailored to a need as

long as the need lasts and then modified or retired.

Several of the participants suggested that

buyers’ standards and tastes may be changing

in a way that affects the market for buildings in

qualitative ways. Buyers may become increasingly intolerant of uninteresting structures, or

structures that do not create a pleasant work

environment. The relationship between the

work environment and workplace productivity

has received particular attention. James Gross

notes that the total wages and salaries paid to

people working in a building is an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the building itself. Anything that can increase the

productivity of the occupants is therefore likely

to be a wise investment.

2. The Structure Itself

a. The ‘Smart’ Building. The construction industry has responded to changing demands by

modifying both what is built and how it is built.

It is becoming difficult to know what we mean

when we talk about a ‘building.’ Surely we

must include the basic space-conditioning and

lighting equipment. Presumably, we also include the systems that operate elevators, security systems, and other equipment key to basic

operation of the building. It seems reasonable to

include the complex computer systems that are

now managing lighting, chillers, and other energy systems. But should other features that

come under the broad concept of ‘smart buildings’ be considered a product of the construction industry? For example, with the breakup of

AT&T, telephone wiring should probably be

treated in the same way we have treated conventional electrical wiring. Should we also include the more sophisticated infrastructure

needed to operate office automation systems:

antennas on the roof; fiber-optic cables; computer centers that may perform telephone

switching, broadband communication, and data

management functions, as well as operate security systems, energy systems, and elevators?

How should we treat furniture if the furniture

becomes a critical part of the office environment. In many cases, for example, it may be

better to make lighting fixtures a part of movable partitions instead of making them permanent fixtures. While ‘shared tenant services’

have not fared well, the difficulties may lie

more with the institutional arrangements offered, and inattention to the real business needs

of customers, than with the underlying capabilities of the technology. Relationships between

building owners and tenants are likely to change

in ways that blur the formerly clear distinction

between the building shell and the apparatus introduced into the building by tenants. At a

minimum, a premium will be placed on structures that can flexibly adapt to changing needs

of tenants. Structures may provide fewer ‘builtin’ services and tenants may be expected to provide more for themselves. Tenant-supplied

lighting, for example, is much more likely to be

efficiently matched to particular needs than systems designed to provide the entire building

with lighting levels high enough to satisfy the

most demanding draftsman. (The advantage of

avoiding fixed lighting systems is underscored

by the fact that the next generation of draftsmen is likely to want lower-than-average lighting levels in areas where they will be looking at

display screens instead of fine print on paper).

On the other hand, buildings could provide

more services, making building owners, in effect, service companies that offer such things as

computer and communication services, along

with ‘basic’ utilities like electricity and heat.

Unfortunately, national data is inadequate for

measuring the extent to which these new technologies are actually being introduced in new

structures. The most impressive examples of

‘smart building’ concepts have been in proprietary structures.

Leaving aside the revolution in the technology of office work, there are also major changes

underway in the technology of the basic structure. The materials used for building components have also changed. Plastic pipe and steel

studs are easy to see, but a variety of other new

products are being used in insulating materials,

floor coverings, exterior wall surfaces, glazing,

and floors. Technology has challenged conventional notions about how to provide basic structural support. Optimum design engineering has
An Introduction 5

refined conventional designs. Truss systems,

such as the one marketed by Space Structures,

can vastly reduce the cost of large, unsupported

spans. A variety of new adhesive materials are

used to attach everything from decorative paneling to structural members.

b. Building Operations. Building control technologies must also be considered as part of

larger systems that are themselves ‘smart.’

Thinking about this issue requires a consideration of the ‘life-cycle costs’ of structures including an analysis of operating costs and the

costs associated with making modifications that

will be needed during the structure’s useful life.

Energy

The energy price increases of the 1970s resulted in an explosion of new ideas for improving the efficiency of energy use in buildings.

New residential and commercial buildings can

be built which use a fifth as much energy per

square foot as comparable structures built during the early 1970s. Some of the improvements

are straightforward — improved insulation, for

example. Some result from a better understanding of heat-flows in structures. And some result

from clever new equipment and control systems. A flood of highly efficient furnaces, air

conditioners, lighting equipment, and other appliances has been introduced during the past

few years. Many are several times more efficient than the equipment they are designed to

replace. But while component improvements

provide important new tools, their full value can

only be recognized if they are used as a part of

an integrated analysis of building energy that

includes an assessment of the dynamic performance of a building’s shell. Overall levels of

savings can be remarkable. The code likely to

be adopted as an industry standard in 1986 recommends levels of energy use that are less than

half the levels typical of the early 1970s. The

savings are not achieved from a single ‘breakthrough’ technology but rather from the combined effects of a large number of

improvements in structural designs, equipment,

and control strategies.

Integrated analysis of energy use should

probably include an assessment of the way

buildings operate as a part of regional networks.

Equipment capable of integrating the energy

management controls of individual structures

with the dispatch controls of electric utilities

can significantly improve the dynamic performance of electric networks taken as a whole.

Experiments are already underway abroad and

in the U.S. by which utilities can continuously

vary their electric rates according to an instantaneous estimate of marginal costs of production, and can transmit this information

periodically to buildings of all kinds (including

residences). Control systems in each structure

can respond to these price signals by adjusting

the performance of equipment in prearranged

ways. The response can be as simple as postponing the start of a water heater or chiller when

prices exceed some threshold level. Dynamic

control over demand can allow utilities to meet

a larger fraction of total electric demand from

relatively inexpensive ‘base-load’ plants using

coal or nuclear fuels.

Sophisticated new building technologies are,

in a very direct way, substitutes for electric generating technologies. Trade-offs between investments in new generating capacity and

investments in buildings are not a trivial matter.

More than two thirds of all electricity in the

U.S. is consumed in residential and commercial

buildings — most of it for commonplace purposes: lighting, refrigeration, and air conditioning. Improved analytical tools, coupled with a

few technical tricks, have permitted vast reductions in the amount of energy required to heat

and cool a building. Changes range from reprogramming air-handling systems, to the development of high-technology light bulbs. Taken

together, they can reduce the net energy consumption of typical residential or commercial

structures by factors ranging from two to ten.

Effective use of these new technologies will require an approach to electric utility management that allows potential investors to make an

unbiased comparison of investments in electric

generation and investments in technologies that

make efficient use of electricity in buildings.

Several workshop participants noted that the

existing system badly biases decisions, since the

financing available to regulated utility monopo-
Technology and the Construction Industry

lies (allowing investments with twenty-year

paybacks) is much different than the financing

available for entrepreneurial investments in

buildings where annual returns of 100 to 200

percent are expected on investments in building

efficiency.

Facilities Management

The issue of facilities management and building operations has about as much sex appeal as

a week-old cheese sandwich. But the issue has

taken on growing importance as demands for

building modifications increase as a result of

the increasing volatility and uncertainty in demands for residential and commercial space —

including changing interest in the energy consumption of buildings. Facilities management

can be greatly simplified by using computerbased drawings and records of the kind that

will be discussed in greater detail in the next

section. A set of digital ‘drawings’ of a building

that can be conveniently updated after each

building modification greatly reduces the uncertainties and costs of structural modifications.

There is less trepidation as you drill through a

wall (famous last words: “Where did they put

the high-voltage cable?”), and there is less need

to track old Fred to his trailer in Florida so that

he can explain what he meant by the note

scrawled on the margin of the original drawings.

A continuously updated building design can

also facilitate analysis of changes in structures

and heating and air-conditioning systems.

3. The Construction Process

Turning to the question of how structures are

actually made, three themes seem to dominate:

(i) improvements in the process by which an

idea goes from a gleam in a designer’s eye to a

set of working drawings; (ii) greater use of factory-based construction techniques; (iii) and use

of more sophisticated equipment in the field.

a. Design. New computer-based systems can

improve the productivity of building design and

analysis. They can rapidly convert concepts to

drawings, convert drawings to analysis and convert all of this to estimates of initial costs and

operating costs. The systems can be used to prepare working sketches and detailed drawings.

Routine building components (repeated window

and door treatments, for example) can be called

from digital files that need be entered only once

by a draftsman. The equipment thus substitutes

for the most tedious aspects of drafting. Price

lists can be built into the systems, allowing an

instantaneous estimate of the cost of different

design alternatives. Advanced systems allow a

computer-based ‘tour’ of building interiors and

exteriors. Once entered, the design information

can be used as the basis for computer-based

structural analysis, an analysis of lighting, or an

assessment of energy consumption.

Many architects, however, greet the prospect

of computer-assisted design with the enthusiasm

of a cat facing a pail of water. Their perception

is that computers will substitute mechanical decisions for taste, and formulas will be substituted for inspiration. All this is plainly possible.

But increasing competitive pressure for speed

and cost control make it extremely difficult for

the average architect to produce an average

building with much imagination, unless there

are some fundamental changes in the design

process. Computer-assisted design systems may

enable such changes. While the full potential of

the systems is unknown, it is apparent that the

systems can remove many barriers between inspiration and execution. They can improve communication between designers and their clients,

allowing vastly more ‘what if’ excursions and

discussions about options at different levels of

investment. There is no good way to calculate

the benefits of greater client satisfaction, but

surely improvements in this area are among the

most important contributions a new technology

can make to the construction process.

Computer-based technologies can significantly reduce the cost of making modifications

to existing plans while preventing errors from

creeping into areas unaffected by the change.

The penalty for trying a radical new idea can

be reduced since the concept can be subjected

to a detailed analysis, and reduced to drawings

that permit a realistic feeling for exterior views

and interior spaces without a major investment

in time or money. Automated design systems
An Introduction 7

coupled with communication systems can facilitate the performance of geographically dispersed teams, allowing clients, engineers,

construction firms, and architects to cooperate

effectively during the evolution of a design.

They can facilitate the process by which specifications are sent out for competitive bids, reduce the uncertainties associated with bidding,

and decrease the burdens associated with the

submission and analysis of proposals,

Once the basic design has been entered into

a computer-based system, a variety of analytical

programs can use the data to assess such things

as the energy-consumption consequences of different design decisions. Until now, one of the

greatest barriers to energyefficient building designs has been the fact that heating, ventilating

and air conditioning (HVAC) analysis is typically conducted after it is too late to change

any major feature of a building’s basic design.

There is also a considerable ‘pain-in-the-neck’

factor involved in submitting drawings to a specialized group for energy modeling. It is tempting to hand completed drawings to an HVAC

engineer and say, “Just make sure it doesn’t

overheat. ”

Design flexibility is not limited to commercial structures since it is now relatively easy to

offer prospective home buyers the opportunity

to design their own floor plans, and compare the

appearance of different interior and exterior

wall coverings in the spaces they have designed.

Though only a fraction of new houses are designed with the help of an architect, it is possible that the new systems may permit

prospective home buyers greater flexibility in

selecting and refining home designs, using the

services of an architect, at least indirectly in the

form of skillfully designed software. The Japanese have a system in place for doing this that

is connected directly to production equipment

capable of delivering preassembled units to a

construction site in two to three weeks.

b. The Construction Process. If computer-assisted design is the first major revolution in the

making of buildings, factory construction is the

second. Construction has always been something of a craft, with each structure fabricated

from basic components in the field. The literature is replete with predictions that this primitive form of fabrication was about to end and

the industry would evolve in a way that would

make it more like conventional manufacturing.

A commission organized for Franklin Roosevelt

in the mid-1930s made this claim. Truman appointed a ‘housing expediter’ who was determined to solve the housing shortage at the end

of the second World War with factory-built

housing. Only a fraction of the goal was met.

George Romney rekindled the dream a generation later with his ‘operation breakthrough,’

which similarly fell far short of its goal. When

forecasters have a track record like this, it is

easy to be cynical about new claims. But we

may have become so cautious that we may not

have noticed how far, and how fast, we have

moved toward factory-based construction of

homes and small commercial structures.

No one in the workshop challenged the estimate that nearly half the homes built today involve a significant amount of factory

construction, with the other half making very

heavy use of factory-built components: roof

trusses, pre-hung windows and doors, ‘wet-cores’

(bathroom and kitchen units), and the like. In

Sweden today over 90 percent of all new houses

are made in the factory. Is our industry headed

in the same direction?

One of the barriers to factory construction

has always been its association with inexpensive,

monotonous ‘pre-fab’ construction. And indeed,

drab, low-quality houses and mobile homes have

been produced in factories. In Sweden, on the

other hand, factory-built structures are considered to be of a higher quality and have a higher

status than site-built homes.

Factory construction offers several clear advantages. It permits uniform assembly, testing,

and inspection. It permits relatively rapid onsite erection, thereby reducing constructing financing charges. It permits the use of more

sophisticated assembly equipment. And it permits the kind of design flexibility described earlier. Of course, not all, or even most, of the

opportunities are exploited in existing fabrication facilities.

The new technology is, of course, not without

some drawbacks. Movement to factory construction could undermine the position of some

small businesses, eliminating jobs or replacing
Technology and the Construction Industry

skilled jobs with relatively unskilled ones, and

weakening the role played by local regulatory

authorities. The next section will return to this

issue.

Field erection techniques are also in the process of rapid change, particularly for commercial structures. A variety of computer-assisted

equipment has been introduced in the past few

years. It ranges from earth-handling equipment

to erection cranes and fully robotic equipment.

Computer-assisted equipment is being introduced for two primary purposes: replacing people in hazardous circumstances, and improving

precision. A significant fraction of construction

accidents, for example, result from crane operations. It is apparently rare for a crane operator

to complete a career without being involved in

a fatal accident. Control equipment can automatically ‘remember’ critical lift heights and

swing restrictions. Earth-loading equipment can

be programmed to dump only after sensing a

truck in a proper orientation.

One of the major barriers to increased construction productivity has been the difficulty of

making joints. Accumulated field errors often

result in joints that fall far short of specified

tolerances. It is difficult to introduce precisely

engineered components in a project where overall standards of precision are lax. Productivity

gains require all components to be erected with

roughly the same standards. Precisely engineered components, such as the computer-constructed, space-frame structures, for example,

must frequently be adjusted to fit imprecise

structures. Errors of as much as a foot are apparently common in structures of ten stories or

more. Improved grading equipment, guided by

laser leveling and positioning equipment, is an

early example of devices designed to improve

the accuracy of field work. In the near future,

computer-assisted equipment with active location controls can further improve the precision

of field work.

A final field that defied the analysis of the

assembled experts had to do with the technologies of renovation and retrofit. Statistics on the

size of these enterprises are particularly poor.

But it is reasonable to argue that rapid improvements in building technology will increase

demands for building renovations to improve

the large stock of existing structures. While

some new technologies are available for diagnosing and repairing problems identified in

older structures, the field remains a very murky

one. Most of the new techniques identified were

designed to pinpoint sources of heat leaks so

that the energy efficiency of the structure could

be improved.

4. Impacts

a. Employment. Taken together, how will new

technologies change the construction industry,

the quality of the products it delivers, and the

nature of the jobs it offers? There is little question that the technologies described have the

potential to affect both the number of jobs generated by the construction industry during the

next decade, and the nature of these jobs, in

dramatic ways. On the whole, it seems likely

that the net labor productivity of the system

can be increased, though experts disagree about

the quality of the jobs that will remain. No one

has a satisfactory explanation for the mysterious fall in the productivity of the construction

industry measured using standard statistical series. Some of the workshop participants claimed

that the decline was an artifact of flawed measurement. The productivity gains created by

modular-home factories, for example, do not

contribute to the measured productivity of the

construction industry since factories are classified as manufacturing firms and not construction companies.

Design firms are likely to see routine drafting

and cost estimating become much more productive as modern equipment assumes a greater

portion of routine chores. There will be fewer

people as well as fewer steps between the designer, the engineer, and the customer. The

opportunity to keep refining and revising designs, and the opportunity to try relatively

imaginative designs at modest cost, may keep

overall levels of employment relatively high

even though the productivity of each individual

analysis may have increased. Certainly this has

happened in other ‘office-automation’ settings

where the demand for new information and

data has outstripped growth in the productivity

of generating data.
An Introduction 9

Factory construction can also reshape construction trades. The technology can be used to

replace skilled field labor with relatively unskilled, routinized jobs in assembly lines. Flexibility in these settings has too often been

achieved the easy way — by laying people off

when business slows. But technology can also

be used to create for production workers relatively attractive, indoor jobs which are less sub

ject to the vagaries of weather. Workers in the

construction industry could then be treated

more like employees of an automobile fabrication facility than day laborers, with greater

opportunity to acquire new skills as new technologies are introduced, more continuity of employment, and better identification with a firm.

b. Education. There is little doubt that the

new building technologies place new burdens on

the educational system. At first the demands

seem contradictory. There will be a need for individuals with highly specialized skills and a

need for individuals with a broad perspective on

many aspects of the design and construction

process. In fact, the underlying demand is for

individuals with basic skills in architecture, engineering and analysis who can quickly acquire

specialized skills when needed. Lighting design

provides a particularly vivid example of the

need for unique combinations of skills. Good

lighting design requires knowledge of such diverse areas as fixture technology, control systems, and daylighting strategies.

There is an obvious need for architects and

engineers familiar with the capabilities of computer-assisted design and analysis techniques.

Architects will need to know more about engineering, and engineers will need to learn more

about design. There are growing demands for

individuals who understand how to analyze

heat-flows in buildings, optimal dispatch of electrical equipment, and the capabilities and limitations of the variety of new materials. And

there is an interest in individuals able to work

as effective members of a multidisciplinary

team.

c. Industry Structure. What will the technology do to the structure of the industry? Will we

see engineering firms displacing architects?

Will smaller design firms be edged out by large

firms capable of mastering expensive new computer technology? Will factory construction

change the role of the small, independent homebuilder who has been the mainstay of the industry for centuries? Will the small builder’s role

be largely one of site preparation and assembly

of components manufactured by larger companies?

Several of the participants argued that engineers will play an increasing role in the design

of buildings, citing examples of architecture

and engineering firms that had become engineering and architecture firms. There is no reason why the engineers should run away with the

show. To maintain control, however, architects

must master the art of gracefully integrating engineering analysis into their designs. Computerbased systems may provide a good opportunity

for doing this.

The cost of powerful design equipment is

falling so rapidly that most small firms will be

able to purchase quite sophisticated computerassisted design and analytical systems within a

few years. Thus, most members of the workshop felt that small design firms would not be

threatened. If nothing else, the dynamic nature

of the industry is conducive to small, relatively

specialized firms that can be combined for specific projects.

The role of the small builder, on the other

hand, may well change if factory construction

captures a growing share of the market. Growing use of factory-made structural elements has

already made the small builder more of an assembler than a craftsman, a trend that is likely

to continue. Will the small builder’s role be limited to pouring a foundation and assembling a

set of modules or panels? Will he become a

captive of major production houses? The experts disagreed on this point.

d. The Dynamic Performance of the Industry.

Will all of this new technology and the pressures of foreign competition lead to a permanent shift in the way the construction industry

conducts research and adopts innovations? At

present, the evidence is somewhat ambiguous.

While there was one strong dissent, most

members of the workshop were concerned by

the shortage of research money in construction.

Virtually all research is conducted by component suppliers and not by the building industry
10 Technology and the Construction Industry

itself. Chemical companies, for example, have

developed new materials for sheathing, roofing,

piping, and adhesives. But research on compnents is not an adequate substitute for research

designed to improve the way the building performs as an integrated system or the way the

construction process operates as a whole.

The largest U.S. home builder apparently has

no research budget. The professional associations of builders and architects have research

budgets that are tiny in proportion to the industry they support. The National Institute for

Building Science has an extremely small research budget. Direct government support for

building-related research funded through HUD,

the Department of Energy, and the Bureau of

Standards was never very large and has been

drastically reduced in recent years.

Failure of construction firms to conduct significant amounts of in-house research can lead

directly to a relatively slow rate of growth in

construction productivity. It can also have

strong indirect effects. Studies of manufacturing firms show that firms with significant

amounts of in-house research are in a much better position to monitor research conducted by

other firms and are much better able to exploit

new discoveries and innovations.

Two other major American industries share

the problems of the construction industry. The

health industry and the agricultural industry

consist of relatively large numbers of relatively

small establishments and firms — few of which

have the resources to conduct their own research. In both cases, the government has chosen to support such research. For reasons of

history, construction is treated quite differently.

5. Where Do We Go From

Here?

It is clearly possible to use new technology to

provide interior spaces that are more productive

and more comfortable, without significant increases in cost. New technologies allow the construction of structures that are more flexible,

more free from defects, and less expensive to

operate. Unfortunately, it is also possible that

foreign construction firms will move more rapidly to exploit these opportunities in U.S. markets than will domestic firms.

The technologies of ‘smart buildings,’ computer-assisted design, and factory-construction

techniques open a range of promising business

opportunities. One of the most fascinating is the

possibility of managing buildings as businessservice companies capable of providing everything from comfortable and flexible office

space to advanced communication networks and

‘value-added’ computer systems. The industry is

clearly capable of delivering superior products

where they are needed. But institutional problems, and an antiquated set of federal, state and

local policies, may make it difficult for innovators in the industry or their potential customers

to exploit the possibilities.
2

Computers and

Construction

Harry Mileaf

Alton S. Bradford

Harry Mileaf

Slow Computer Use In Construction

I’ve been studying the construction industry’s

involvement with computers since 1979, and

have done so in over twenty surveys. Each survey dealt with samples that measured in the

thousands. The results of each survey and their

cumulative trend analysis have led me to be

somewhat conservative in my near-term forecasting. The studies have repeatedly shown that

there is no revolution taking place. Progress and

changes have been evolutionary, and will continue to be so in the near term — during the

rest of this decade. There are some prognosticators in our industry who have been much

more liberal in their forecasting, anticipating a

revolution in the industry in the not-too-distant

future. I agree that revolution will come, but

not in the near term. The evolutionary process

will continue until after the mid 1990s, when

the cumulative effects of computer use by the

various influences in our industry, as well as the

greater sophistication of computer systems at

that time, will speed up the evolutionary pace

to that of revolutionary proportions, if left unchecked. Evolution can be controlled, revolution

cannot. There is the potential that by the year

2000 a major dislocation can occur in the design industry.

By the end of this decade over 90 percent of

the design firms say that they will be using

computers. This sounds like this alone will have

a major impact on our industry; but, it probably

will not, because of what the computers are being used for, and the projected growth of these

uses.

The average firm that uses computers has

barely scratched the surface of potential applications. The tendency is toward four or five

rote applications, those applications that are

easiest and most inexpensive to get started with,

and which appear to have quickest productivity

gains: word processing; spec writing; accounting; number crunching. There is little integration of these applications, almost no data base

activity, and very slow growth in meaningful

graphic design systems. What little is being

done with sophisticated graphic design systems

(about 7 percent with the small firms and about

12 percent with the large firms — 8 percent

overall) is almost limited to drawings not design. This seems to make sense because drawing

production is where the major labor effort is in

a design office. But productivity gains in this

application are scattered and many times unattainable. Even if the productivity gains were attainable, the gain would only show up for the

specific projects being worked on. Even with a

firm that is heavily involved with computers,

only a small percentage of project work is handled by computer. The majority of work is still

being done in the age-old, traditional, manual

manner. This is why, even though computers

have become commonplace in the design profession, they have had little impact on the profession. A staff of thirty sharing one terminal, or a

staff of fifty sharing three, or a staff of two

hundred and fifty sharing thirty will continue

this low impact.

Why Is This?

Even the computers of today do not have the

abilities to fulfill the promise of tomorrow. The

computers still rely too heavily on the availability of individual applications programs to accomplish individual tasks, and both the

hardware and software are still too expensive to

put the entire staff at the keyboard. The great

advantage of the computer comes from the

computer taking over a task and completing it

without human intervention. The so-called automated spec writing systems of today are not

really automated, but merely mechanized versions of the old cut-and-paste method of spec

writing. Too much human interaction is still required. The same is true of the so-called sophisticated drawing systems, and the other

specific-task activities being done by computer.

As long as the computer continues to merely

mechanize the individual tasks with the help of

human operators, and particularly without the

tasks and data being integrated, progress will

continue to be slow.
But We Cannot Be Misled By This

The improvements in the capabilities of computers over the last five years have been immense, and their drop in prices, remarkable.

These improvements will continue, likely in an

accelerated way to the point where their use

will have a dramatic impact on how design offices function, and will likely change the way

the entire industry functions. But when?

The specific applications computers of the

past and present, which rely on complicated expensive programming, are already evolving into

expert systems, systems which are not only developed by experts in your field, but which also

contain data bases of expert knowledge. Such

systems will require less and less complicated

specific-task software written in expensive code

language. The user’s dialogue with the computer will be in straightforward English. Some

systems of this type are already being used successfully in other industries. By the end of this

decade, expert systems will be a growing force

in the construction industry.

Concurrent with expert systems, artificial

intelligence systems are receiving a good deal of

attention in the academic world; and in the Japanese computer industry, it has become a national effort to make it a realization in the early

‘90s.

And There Is A New Force In The

Marketplace

The new force is the client, the one who

funds the new construction. Clients are changing. They are becoming more and more sophisticated. They are starting to computerize more

rapidly than the construction designers, Even

CADD vendors recognize this, and have diverted much of their efforts from the slow-buying construction designers to the corporate

world. Business, industry, institutional, and public sector organizations recognize that CADD

use in facilities management represents a good

investment, Facilities management, which was

heretofore a heterogeneous practice is becoming

more organized; and corporations getting

CADD systems are starting to lay their construction plans around facilities management

data bases. Clients are gaining much more

knowledge and are building confidence and relying less on design consultants. Where many

once relied on advice, there is a trend toward

dictating their wants, While there always were

some clients who pulled the strings, there is a

growing number of CADD-using corporations

making the decisions.

There are shifting influences in the construction industry, and the corporation client is moving into the dominant influence position. To

assure the effectiveness of their facilities management programs, these clients are now letting

contracts to those design firms who can supply

computerized data compatible with theirs. This

means that the design firm must have the same

computer and software as each of the clients

who demands it, or access to the same. And the

corporate clients do not go for the small PC

drawing systems.

It Will Get Worse Before It Will Get

Better

As more and more clients adopt their own

CADD systems, the CADD decisions made by

design firms will depend on who they want to

have as clients. Some firms are already into two

or three CADD systems to serve two or three

different clients. Little needs to be said about

how the proliferation of computerized facilities

management in the corporate world will compound the problems of design firms, While designers have always formed temporary

convenience partnerships to get contracts, clients’ computerization will compound this activity, creating strange bedfellows. And, since

most design firms cannot afford to have many

CADD systems, there will be a trend toward

designers becoming captive suppliers to certain

clients, with the ball and chain being the common CADD system, This period of confusion in

which the computer will dominate client/designer award decision will grow throughout this

decade into the early ‘90s, but will abate with

the new generation of computers and the fewer

computer manufacturers that survive the con-
14 Computers and Construction

tinuing shakeout. Compatibility will be less of

problem, especially with the artificial intelligence systems and the tendency toward more

standard data bases. The clients’ power will

continue to grow, and there will be increasing

pressure for even greater productivity gains

promised by the system of the 1990s.

The Scenario By the Year 2000

a

Computers will perform the overall functions

of a design office in an integrated manner. No

longer will individual manual tasks be replicated; the new generation of computers will

form the core of the overall practice, and will

be used on all projects, from the initial planning

right through construction and the continuing

space planning changes, remodeling, extensions,

and maintenance.

Designers will use the systems to solve problems, gather information, test designs, and to

accumulate knowledge from project to project.

The designers’ instructions will be accumulated

in the computer and arranged into rational, organized instructions. When the design is done,

the computer will generate the sets of drawings,

specifications, construction documents, schedules, estimates, RFQ’s, project control documents, etc., with little or no professional

interaction. Ultimately, paper output might not

be needed.

The Implications

are that many manual functions in a design

office will be replaced. Professional functions in

a design office are categorized by: (1) design;

which is the creative, decision-making part of a

project; and (2) production, which is responsible

for producing the manifestations of the design

in the form of construction drawings and documents. In the design phase, the computer will

be an invaluable aid to the professional, but in

the production phase, the computer will function almost alone.

Almost eight out of ten architects will be affected by this. Unlike other professions, almost

80 percent of the architectural professional effort in a design office is devoted to the production of drawing and documents and other rote

activities. This figure is derived from the way a

‘typical’ design office functions on a project.

Typically, design expense amounts to about 20

percent of the total, while the drawings account

for about 50 percent of the project cost. Drawing production, then, is about 2-1/2 times the

cost of design. But draftspersons get paid considerably less than designers. According to a recent New York AIA study of architectural

salaries at six professional levels, the average

compensation of the high levels is often more

than 50 percent higher than the average lowerlevel architect. This means that for production

drawings to cost 2-1/2 times design, about 3.8

architectural draftspersons are used for each designer. When spec writing and other document

efforts are considered, the ratio of production to

design becomes four to one. About four out of

five architects are threatened with dislocation

from their profession in fifteen years — by the

year 2000.

In the engineering profession the problem is

similar, but the engineers themselves will be affected less. The engineering draftspersons, who

are generally not professionals, will be seriously

dislocated, but the engineers, only partly so,

due to the growing number crunching and analytical capabilities of the next generation of

computers. The growing independent action of

the computer as it accumulates repeatable and

broadening analysis capabilities will continually

reduce the need of certain engineers performing

those functions today.

The Solid Modeling Craft Will Be

Automated

In many instances, the 3-D color graphics of

the next generation of computers will reduce

the need for solid models, particularly as holography continues to develop. When solid models

are needed, the computer driving a laser sculpturing device will create the model.

Spec writers, cost estimators, and interior designers will be affected in similar ways. The

need for specification and cost specialists will

be reduced to the caretaking, updating, and

quality control functions. Interior designers,

who function similarly to architects (and often

are) will be affected similarly to the architects.

There Will Be Fewer Independent

Consultants

Aside from the computer competitive pres-
.

Harry Mileaf 15

sures causing this, the convenience and productivity of computer design will cause more

clients to do more of their own work in-house.

Many of the larger clients who presently have

their own design staffs, and use outside services

for overflow work will have less overflow. And

those that do not presently have their own staffs

will find it more convenient to establish their

own staffs.

Building product manufacturers, who presently rely on the independent designers to have

their products specified will adopt computer

practices to compete with independent architects and engineers. In a few engineering

trades, this has always been done; the next generation of computers will provide new avenues

for more of these efforts.

There Will Be Greater Specialization

Because contract awards will in part be

based on computer compatibility and computer

knowledge buildup, there will be a greater tendency for specializing in certain types of industries, private vs. public, and agency vs. agency,

in addition to types of construction.

Preparing For The Dislocation

There are the optimistic in the design industry that have predicted that those professionals,

particularly the architectural draftspersons, who

are displaced from their non-design jobs, will

merely become designers. Doug Stoker and

Nick Weingarten of SOM pointed out the financial fallaciousness of that logic with some

cold hard logic in the December 1983 issue of

Architectural Record. The client simply will

not pay for overstaffed design, and the firm will

not pay what it cannot bill. The only way for

production professionals to be absorbed in design is for the number of design projects to

grow. It is unlikely that the construction industry can grow large enough to absorb all of the

dislocated — the industry would have to grow

400 percent in about fifteen years. I cannot recall when that has last happened.

Other experts in the field feel the solution

will come by itself. They expect other new jobs

(now very specific) to be created by computers.

While this has been true in some other computer applications where new industries resulted

— particularly the computer industry — the

same does not necessarily have to happen in

construction design. The construction industry

can be better equated to the automobile industry as it was impacted by foreign robotics.

This is an issue too serious to be left to

chance,

Take It As An Opportunity

Reexamine the role of the construction design profession, There is already a question

about whether many firms are really in the design or drawing business. The computer is a

two-way street. While on one hand it will displace people, it can also open new avenues for

the enterprising. One such avenue is to play a

larger role in the growing facilities management

business. Bill Mitchell of UCLA has been

preaching this for two years. There are probably

other potential areas for growth.

This should be made a priority study program by the major institutions in the construction market: AIA; ASCE; ACEC; ASHRAE;

CSI; NSPE; et. al., and should include academia. It is entirely conceivable that government

grants could be had for this effort. There is

plenty of time to prepare.

Today’s missed opportunities are tomorrow’s

problems.

Harry Mileaf is Director of Technology and Product

Development, Sweet’s Division, at McGraw-Hill Information Systems Company. He is also Chairman of

the Coordinating Council for Computers in Construction.
16 Computers and Construction

Alton S. Bradford

Our mission is to plan, design and construct

shore facilities for the Navy. This amounts to

approximately $2 billion in construction a year.

We’re worldwide with six Engineering Field Division offices to accomplish our design and construction. We also have nine Public Works

Centers that handle our operation and maintenance projects. (See Figure 1)

The basic building process is a time-phased,

fragmented, ad hoc industry. Separate organizations plan, design, construct, own, etc. In the

product acquisition process, we bring people together to do the design on a one-time basis and

then competitively bid the construction (with a

separate group). One would never do that with

an automobile or aircraft. We design in-house,

but about 90 percent is done on contract with

architecture and engineering firms.

The building process presents many problems

and opportunities when we examine it for computer applications. (See Figure 2) In-house, we

are doing computer-aided design (design calculation) using time-sharing and personal computers. This includes structural analysis, energy

analysis of buildings and such. The work is being done by the engineer at his desk, or the

nearby computer computer terminal.

We also do guide specifications, as Harry

Mileaf mentioned, using a word-processing system. Guide specifications are documents used

to produce a contract (project) specification.

The guide specifications and the specific

project specifications are both now being done

on a word-processing system.

We utilize computers to do project cost estimates. Material quantities are the input and the

construction estimate, the output. The factors

for labor and material costs, location, economic

conditions, projected date of bid, etc., are programmed in. The estimate’s and actual bids are

stored in the system for developing and checking future budget estimates at the programming

stage.

Our Graphics Design System, a major advancement in using computers, is well underway. We’re installing a computer-based system

that uses the language of the architect, engineer

and building process people, i.e., three-dimenFigure 1
Alton S. Bradford 17

sional (3-D) models. Having always used

renderings and models, architects and engineers

can now construct and view a 3-D model data

base. This model facilitates working with other

individuals to define requirements and expectations, We are also able to do two and three-dimensional drawings directly from the data base.

Automated production of drawings, specifications, and cost estimates, from the data base, is

in the future.

The four basic phases of the building process

are quite distinct: ( 1 ) plan and budget (market);

(2) design; (3) construct; and (4) own, operate,

and maintain the building throughout its life.

(See Figure 3)

We targeted our computer graphics to that

critical decision period (three months) when the

parameters and decisions for the building/facility are set. We then use the computer as

changes in the design occur. We’d like very

much to eventually, say within the next ten to

fifteen years, get to the point where we can

change the design model and automatically produce the drawings, specifications, and cost estimates.

It’s taken us about two years to get computer

graphics into our organization. We have installations in our six Engineering Field Divisions

and four of our nine Public Works Centers. We

are training as many people as possible in the

new technology.

The hardware consists of a desk, keyboard,

digital pen, and menu of instructions which allows the architect/engineer to sit and do his design work or interact with others involved in the

design, (See Figure 4) Individuals, using a computer model, can develop the expectations for a

particular project right on the screen. It is simply a work station for the architect or engineer.

We are using some 2-D graphics, but that’s

only normally communicable between engineers

and architects. (See Figure 5) The emerging

graphics technology will allow creation of models (three-dimensional) where you don’t need a

degree in architecture or engineering to understand the project graphics. The technology is increasing as rapidly as the desire to depict

objects in the three-dimensional mode. (See

Figure 6)

An actual 2-D example is where we take a

F re 2
18 Computers and Construction

standard room layout and reproduce it until we

have a string of rooms. (See Figure 7) We can

then mirror image the string about a corridor

centerline to produce a floor plan. We add dimensions, notes, etc., and print the drawing.

There’s no drafting involved. This is an actual

drawing that went out to bid. (See Figure 8)

Figure 9 shows a building floor lighting plan.

Unfortunately, the black and white print cannot

show you the way we use colors. Color is a

communication medium, not only between individuals, but between the engineer and the computer system. The Bureau of Standards is

working on the IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange System), to enable graphic data communication between different computer systems.

In the future, we’ll get away from the big

desk units. We’re going to see much smaller,

flat screen, desk top, 3-D units with more capacity and capability. (See Figure 10)

Maybe a plasma-type screen or something

new. We expect, within five years, they will be

as common as large desk calculators or personal

computers are today. In San Francisco last

week, we saw computer graphics on PCs. TechFigure 3

nology is increasing rapidly, and prices are in

the acceptable range of 15 to 25 thousand dollars. This will be the salvation of many small

A/E firms.

He Here are some examples of 3-D graphics. Soon (five to ten years) we will be able to

represent an object in the machine as a solid. I

have a few slides on this subject. This is a 3-D

wire frame model, with some shading. (See Figure 11 )

Here is a building with color and shaded surfaces and the lights turned on. (See Figure 12)

And here it is with the lights turned off. We

could even pass the sun over the building and

get the sun’s shading effect. (See Figure 13)

Graphics has always been a communications

medium. Now the architect/engineer can communicate with somebody who wants a project,

and develop a very clear expectation for the facility or building. One brings a great deal more

to, and gets a great deal more out of, a 3-D picture/mode compared to a 2-D floor plan or a

list of numbers, letters, or a work description.

We expect widespread use of graphics during

the late ’80s by the A/E firms (Figure 14).

.

30%
Alton S. Bradford 19

We’re training our personnel and getting involved in the contractual aspects. Graphics data

exchange capability between systems will be

available. By the late ‘80s, most of our design

documents will require digital graphics data

bases in addition to the normal plan, specs, and

cost estimates. We think the major integration

in the building process will be in the design

phase. It is the easiest to get a handle on and

utilize data bases for the specifications,

drawings and cost estimates. Later (early ‘90s)

we need to get the whole process together. The

external data base is an area that we should f0-

cus on. This includes the Sweet’s catalog type

information, generic building products information, codes, regulations, etc. A project integrated data base which is a model from which

one would be able to directly produce a set of

design documents (plans, specifications, schedule, and cost estimate) appears feasible by the

year 2000.

The chart on Figure 15 gives another representation of the building process. We use multiple firms in the process. It depicts the ad hoc

fragmented, and time/work phased building

process. Therefore, data base development and

standardization will be very difficult. Here one

sees the Sweet’s catalog type external product

data base, the main data base within the organization, a project generic data base, and the

project specific data base. We’re learning as we

start to do some of this with our in-house design

work to get involved in this process.

Impacts

These will be my personal views:

The Nature and Form of Buildings

Use of computer graphics will yield more appropriate solutions. The building is a solution to

a problem of need. Solutions tend to be unique.

We’ll be able to give better solutions. We’ll be

able to integrate building systems for energy

and economy. It’s not amazing that most buildings are stand-alone systems stuck together in a

big box. There will be some standardization.

The manufactured building industry is curious

about this item. When we design buildings by

assembling computer stored, pre-designed building components, standardization will be re-

●

Figure 4
—

20 Computers and Construction

quired. This will allow faster and better designs.

It’s going to be a slow evolutionary change.

Quality and Safety of Buildings

These factors are driven by codes and regulations. Computers will be used to check project

models against the codes, regulations, standards, etc. There will be an increase in attention

to functionality (safety and quality) which will

yield better buildings. On the whole, however, I

expect no major changes resulting from the introduction of computers.

Cost and Affordability of Building

Computers will shorten the building acquisition period. This will reduce the cost and the

exposure of the project to change (risk) and,

therefore, increase the affordability. We’ll be

able to better meet expectations. Therefore, the

cost and schedules and things of those natures

will be firmer, easier to handle, resulting in a

noticeable, but moderate change in this area

due to computer technology.

Industry Productivity

Computers will decrease the number of changes

resulting from misunderstood expectations.

Also, with computer technology, we will be able

to translate those unforeseen changes quickly

into project bid document revisions. This will

decrease the time and effort (calendar time and

manual effort) required to produce project bid

documents, and result in a major increase in

productivity. There will also be a decrease in

the life-cycle resources. We’re going to be

putting better buildings together, faster, meeting expectations, and with less changes required

during design and construction. The contract

documents (drawings) are going to be clearer.

They’re going to be automated off the system,

just like letters coming off a word processor.

Drawings will be corrected before they are produced. It’s the old bit, that if you produce a

good product at the end of the assembly line,

you have less returns. We will be studying and

analyzing more options, with the objective of reducing, in addition to the initial cost, the life-cycle energy, operation and maintenance, and

manning costs.

Figure 5
Alton S. Bradford 21

On Changes in Job Skills, Skill Levels, Occupations

This is the big one. There’s going to be a

slight net increase in jobs. There is great diversity in types of work in the building process.

There’s going to be a decrease in the jobs associated with engineering calculations and the direct production of contract plans and

specifications. Some jobs definitely will change.

One doesn’t need an architect to set hours and

draw a perspective. It can be done with a computer in minutes. I don’t know how familiar you

are with computer graphics technology, but one

can actually walk through a three-dimensional

model of a project (structure) after the data

base is constructed on the computer. The data

base is constructed using simple drafting techniques; by putting lines, circles and squares, or

parts and pieces of building systems together.

It’s rather quick and easy.

A tremendous amount of information can be

used beyond the design phase for building operations including management of rental space,

and furnishings. To produce the data during the

design is not difficult. It’s the result of the interior design, structural design, etc. But to operate and maintain a building and you need to

know where every person is, their telephone

number, what pieces of furniture they’re assigned, their floor covering, date of occupancy,

etc. When you start managing change, the data

developed during the design, planning, and programming phases become very useful. There

will be new jobs and skills required in developing and using this type of data. However, there

is a major problem in standardization of communications across organizational lines. None of

the ad-hoc groups in the building process needs

all of the information developed during project

acquisition, and there’s no single overseer of the

process. This creates a big problem area and

contributes to the inertia of the building processes. Change will be slow.

The Role of Engineers

Technology will enhance and improve the designer’s and consultant’s capability to create,

view, analyze (technically, functionally, and financially) and change the project model prior to

documentation or construction of the project.
22 Computers and Construction

This project information will be retained and

updated in machine usable form for latent uses

during the construction, operation and maintenance, and use phases of the project life cycle.

As a result, the changes in the engineering office environment will be:

(1) A decrease, if not complete elimination,

of manual computations. Technical analysis and

design will be by computer from building/

project geometry data using external code, standards, and product data bases.

(2) An increase in the need for technical expertise that can use computers at a high level of

building systems selection and integration.

These experienced technical personnel will need

to bring good interpersonal skills to the future

team approach to effective problem solving.

(3) A sharp decrease in the amount of labor

intensive drafting, coordination, and checking as

a result of automated drafting systems. Construction documents will be a relatively fast,

automated process. Present technicians and

draftspersons will be utilized to create and

maintain the computer graphics system and

data base.

(4) A change in the role of the engineer from

‘a designer of buildings’ to ‘a designer of computer-based systems and procedures’ to be used

by experienced designers and skilled technical

people (paratechnical) to design buildings.

(5) An increase in the use of computer resident, mapping and building process data bases.

In the future the professional engineering firms

will be called on:

(1) To establish, maintain, and operate computer-resident, mapping and building data bases

for the public and private sectors, and operate

these throughout the life cycle of the buildings

and facilities.

(2) To develop a clear, accurate, complete

and timely project definition package (marketing package/budgeting package).

(3) To provide the service of developing the

project definition package into a set of accurate

and complete construction documents in a sub

stantially shorter time than the present.

(4) To provide a management service, using a

project data base, throughout the life cycle or

Figure 7
Alton S. Bradford

major portion of the life cycle of the project.

This could be an independent service or as part

of a joint contract arrangement. This would be

a design/construct, construction management

(CM) effort with some test-operate-maintain

role.

(5) To provide a service to the professional

standards organizations, large public and private building owners and other firms in the areas of programming, procedures, standards,

program certification, project data conversion,

etc.

Education

A large percentage of the individuals coming

out of school into the building process, architects, engineers, etc., have a good education in

their discipline. The problem is we also need architects and engineers to work together in a

team to put a building together. We spend a

great amount of time and effort training them

to work together. They lack intra- and interpersonal skills. When computers are used to accomplish some of the work, they are going to

need the skills to shift into a team problem solving environment. Technical education has got to

teach team and social skills. The best course I

ever had was in construction planning and programming. Working in teams, we developed

projects from conception through to final design

detail. The building process will need technical

people skilled in working as a team player.

Organization, Number and Size of

Enterprises

Small A&E firms are going to survive. Service firms are emerging to do computer-aided

design and drafting and to translate documents

from one computer system to another. The use

of computers in the building process is presently vendor-stimulated and user driven. Data

base development, a necessity in the future use

of computers, is hampered by lack of standardization, and the very nature of the process.

However, the process is changing. Education

needs to concentrate on the changes facing peopie, organizations, standards and traditions in

the application of computers in the building

process. Teaching technology is not the problem.

23

Figure 8
—

24 Computers and Construction

Establishment of structured informational

data bases in the building process is one key to

the growth of computer utilization. The National Research Council (Building Research

Board) is looking at this and other questions on

new technological impacts to the building process. Based on some of the study work, there

are major changes occurring in the number, size

and types of enterprises in the building process.

Conclusion

The federal building process can be described as a sequential, somewhat overlapping,

set of easily definable functions. They are: planning, programming, and budgeting; design and

engineering; procurement and construction; operation and maintenance; and use. Or more simply, planning, design, construction, and use.

Although these basic functions will probably remain the same, the trend in the federal sector is

to contract out combinations of these functions.

Combining the design and construction functions into a single ‘turnkey’ or ‘two-step’ type

contract, contracting for the building using a

performance specification, and at the extreme

end of this construction, staff, maintenance and

operation and the user simply pays for the service. Because of major social, environmental,

safety, and of course, political concerns, there

will also be an increase in the complexity, number and types of predesign (planning) studies required to identify the benefits and disbenefits of

the proposed construction. The list of studies

will, in addition to the present cost, scope, environmental, energy and schedule studies, be expanded to examine the functional, visual,

esthetic, economic, social, etc., impacts on the

public and organization environment. There will

be an increased need for easily understandable

project definition and fast, accurate schedules

and cost estimates to confirm and track project

expectations. There will be an increasing emphasis and therefore need to deal with change

throughout the building planning and design

functions in order to hold major financial commitments to the latest possible point to assure

the lowest possible risk. This emphasis on dealFigure 9
Alton S. Bradford

ing with change will require early, more accurate, rapid communications of expectations of

the building configuration, function, and cost.

Likewise, there will be a need to expend less

time and personnel resources on those buildings

that don’t undergo drastic changes, or are of a

less risky nature. This will result in an increase

in standardization of building designs (or modular designs), more reuse of acceptable designs,

and a major emphasis on having the accurate

design data available in an analytically usable

form. There will be an emphasis on having

ready access to and using the latest, most costeffective materials, equipment, procedures, and

building systems, in lieu of waiting for these to

show up in federal standards, design guides or

specifications. In summary, there will be a need

to proceed from idea to construction start in the

shortest period of time with the least risk of financial loss.

Computer Technology

Computer technology, presently available to

the building process, is changing more rapidly

than our ability to use it productively. Predictable trends over the next 10 to 20 years are that

the amount of storage available for computer

programs and data will be unlimited or very

cost effective. The cost of better and more

functional computer hardware will continue to

drop at a steady rate while software capability

will increase at an exponential rate. The cost of

specialized software together with the availability of trained personnel will continue to be the

major factors in system utilization. The computer terminal’s physical size will continue to

diminish while storage capacity, speed and ease

of use will continue to increase. Probably the

most significant advancements in the next two

decades will be the further development of computer graphics modeling, hardware and software, for use in both the visual and analytical

interface mode. New software technologies that

will evolve include: a neutral, machine-t&machine language; expert programs for building

system design; automated drawings, specifications, schedule and cost estimates directly from

computer graphic model; micro and macro

project products and building systems data

25

Figure 10
26 Computers and Construction

bases; and computer graphics solid modeling.

Hardware advancements will include: flat

screens; laser readers, printers and storage devices; highly-specialized, plug-in ROM chips

and even holographic screens or units.

In summary, the changes in the building process and the concurrent changes in the product

and services provided by the engineering profession, will be as a result of needs of the building

owner/user. Of course, there will be some iterative interplay between the capability of the professional firms and the perceived needs of, or

benefits to, the owner/operator. The major advance in the use of computer technology in the

building process will be the engineer’s ability to

communicate real expectations with the owner,

and to communicate with the computer, both

using the language of graphics. This use of the

technology will enable the professional to provide the owner/user with the much needed

project information on which to base critical

planning and financial decisions while also being able to react to change without major

project delays.

Alton S. Bradford is Assistant Commander for Engineering and Design, at the Naval Facilities Engineering

Command of the United States Department of the

Navy

Figure 11
Alton S. Bradford 27

Figure 12
28

Figure 14

Computers and Construction

Figure 15
3

Richard Carl

Smart Office Buildings

Richard Carl Reisman

Michael Clevenger

Piero Patri

Reisman

Our topic today is the intelligent office building, which could be the most tangible area for

automation in the world of offices. I am very

delighted to be here with Mike Clevenger and

Piero Patri. My part is to tell you exactly what

is happening today, where we are now and provide some background, and then set the stage

for Michael to tell you what is happening to

morrow, and for Piero to tell you what is happening the day after tomorrow. They will

discuss the near and not so near future in office

automation, as well as environmental design and

office furnishings and systems, and how the related emerging changes will impact us all.

Today we will apply a quote which I am

about to read, which has become very commonplace for automation, but we would like to apply that more to ‘smart’ buildings of today. It is

from the local Silicon Valley newspaper, and it

says, “Entering its modern form barely forty

years ago, the computer already has permeated

almost every aspect of American life. Yet no

one even remotely familiar with the computer

revolution can sanely claim that the revolution

is beyond its formulative stages. In other words,

you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Well, let us apply that to buildings today. In

order to do that and explain the impact of automation on construction, I would like to set the

stage and talk about some major events that

have happened.

Number one, in particular, is the telephone

company divestiture. Since they have split up

and since they are not doing certain things that

they used to do for us, we are having to do

them ourselves, and we are looking to private

industry to fill that gap. That has a phenomenal

impact, and it is hard to get used to.

Most people, and indeed office building tenants, are born with the expectation of the Godgiven right to have a dial tone all of their lives.

When they do not have it, they do not know

what to do. Who do they go to? What are the

problems? The problems and impact have a rip

pling effect.

But the void has created some tremendous

new business opportunities as well. Not only has

the gap created a void that everyone can rush

into to provide such services, but we have had a

parallel event. While the phone company was

busy breaking up, we have had a tremendous

advancement in virtually all kinds of computer

applications.

Therefore, we not only have a growth of

opportunity in that the role of the phone is

changing, but new technologies are creating unprecedented business opportunities as well. The

combination of these events has triggered an explosive growth in automation.

The impact on the construction industry is

that the building sponsor must wire up services

in buildings. The imbedded base of wiring and

equipment required to provide all services must

now be installed as a regular part of the building design.

So much for events. There area lot of players running around, trying to get used to all of

this. The building developers are the entities, if

you will, that build the largest quantity of speculative office space. They are the ones who will

face the responsibilities, or perhaps embrace the

opportunities would be a better way to say it, of

making sure that such services are provided. If

they want to stay around and be competitive,

they will have to do it. They can determine

their own involvement. They can be totally in

the office automation business, they can do it

part way, or they can arrange for someone else

to do it in their building.

There are corporations who are tenants or

own their own buildings; i.e., some of them

lease, some of them develop their own spaces.

They are, as a rule, large enough to obtain their

own equipment on a non-shared basis, for example, purchase word processors or other equipment which might otherwise be shared by

smaller companies. They purchase large equipment themselves, so they are getting into the office automation ‘act’ as well.

The realtors, so far, have been very far behind. They are not up to speed on what is happening in shared tenant services. They are not
up to speed in leasing office buildings as buildings which provide services as well as providing

shelter. They will need to catch up and may

play an important role.

The service providers are in the lead because

so much of the office-automation revolution is

vendor driven. They are, however, creating a lot

of hype, and we are trying to sort out what is legitimate, leading, front-edge development and

activity from hype. We are doing our best to

serve our clients by sorting all of that out.

Vendors are in the same situation, but they

are also grabbing the new business opportunities. IBM has always made office equipment

and is now jumping in. They are making furniture. There is a tremendous impact on business,

wonderful opportunities, and everybody is grabbing at it.

Honeywell is a little different story. They

have always made building controls. Now, they

are getting into shared tenant services. So, everybody from the large companies to the small

are revising profiles, in light of automation

changes and opportunities.

So, given all of these players, all of this background, and the increase in automation, we

have need, then, for them to come together in

the ‘intelligent’ building, and an ‘intelligent’

building is one then that combines two essential

ingredients to make it intelligent. By the way,

we are in the process of calling them ‘intelligent’ now, replacing the older term ‘smart.’ If I

lapse into ‘smart,’ please excuse me. The two

ingredients are provisions for computerized

(intelligent) building systems, and shared tenant

services.

Of the shared tenant services, certainly the

telephone services now are the biggest. They are

the most lucrative, and of the telephone services, long-distance resale revenues are the most

lucrative. Those are by far in the most demand

in view of the phone company’s split-up, as I

mentioned. But, there are other services, as

well, such as word processing, data, and a number of other things which we will go into a little

later.

The other ingredient that is in the ‘smart’

building is the building management services or

systems. These have been around a little longer.

They are the dark horse that have come more

to the forefront since the spotlight has now

been highlighting office automation. I can walk

into a building and take my ‘key’ (actually a

magnetic card) and put it in front of a plate,

and all sorts of things will happen, even if it is

Sunday night. The lights will turn on the way to

the elevator and the elevator will allow me to

go to my floor, and the lights will go on from

the elevator to my office, and my office will not

only function with lights, air conditioning and

shared tenant services, but a security system

printout will let my landlord know exactly who

was in the building, where and when. That is

getting to be a pretty intelligent building system.

Everybody is getting into this now and

scrambling into the act at different speeds. The

Urban Land Institute, which is probably the

premium organization of the real estate development businesses in the country, brought the

subject into focus in Chicago in June in the conference ‘Developing the High-Tech Commercial

Project.’ We participated in that conference,

and the conclusion of the conference was that

everybody is still problem solving, and we are

all going to get out there in the next two years

and build some more buildings and get back together to compare what we have done.

What we are doing is doctoring up our buildings in certain ways to make them ‘smart’ or

ready to be ‘smart.’ In our particular firm, we

are trying not to let a project out of the door

that ignores at least some of the design principles which I will touch on briefly here.

We certainly are seeing a change in the mechanical and electrical components of buildings.

New demands in office equipment and office

environments require that more intense localized demands be met by more flexible systems.

You cannot go into a building that is not ready

for it and put in a specialized installation and

run an extra grille into the ceiling when the system is not prepared for it.

Automated equipment is growing. Cooling is
32 Smart Office Buildings

not only required to keep us comfortable while

the computers are generating heat, but more

importantly, those computers cannot function if

the environment is not properly controlled. So,

we are seeing 25 to 50 percent more costs in

mechanical systems right now. We are seeing a

need for 24-hour performance and flexibility.

We are seeing a lot more flexibility and, thus,

as a bottom line impact, we are generating

higher quality structures.

There is a greater cabling and wiring need in

buildings. As I mentioned, we have to do the

communications cabling ourselves since the

phone company is no longer providing it. We

are seeing needs for local area networks. We

are seeing needs to accommodate more equipment. Indeed, in a 280,000-square-foot project

we recently completed, everyone in the building

had an automated station, a screen and a keyboard. The cabling requirements were absolutely immense. That project happened to be a

retrofit.

We are looking for clean signal distribution

and clean grounding. This affects certain technical things that we do in the electrical installation, but we are seeing the impact in that

cabling trays or racks are common in buildings.

Teflon coated wiring is eliminating the large

costs of having to put all of these lines into conduit, but the bottom line is still greater costs.

It may be obvious that we are needing things

like increased power provisions in buildings to

handle all of the new loads, but there are architectural things as well. We are laying out space

for all of the equipment to make these buildings ‘smart.’ We are putting in greater floor-tofloor heights to accommodate the plenums, the

wire management, some of the other things that

have to be done in the buildings. These things,

again, have a cost impact. If you take a thirtystory building and increase the height of the

typical floor by six inches, for example, and

your marble skin costs so much for each six

inches, you can start to see you are adding a

story or two of height on the building, a big impact and a big cost item up front.

Even architectural design is affected by it.

We are trying to deal with the aesthetics, as

well as the technical problems, such as accommodating the equipment or satellite dishes, if

you will. The issue is how they look when set

atop buildings. These things, as they impact industry, perhaps may not be great, but we are

dealing with those human issues, and I have a

counterpoint to the lack of design mentioned

earlier that I might get to later in the question

and answer period.

We are working structurally, preparing the

rooftop for equipment. We are preparing our

rooftops to bring signals in from the top, as well

as we have always done from the bottom.

Our tenant service requirements are typically

generating new products, such as flat wire and

carpet tiles. They are becoming more present

on the scene and they are developing more and

more. Michael will discuss this further.

Our building management systems are becoming more sophisticated. I mentioned an example of security systems, but every system in

the building is now being run that way. Elevators, for example, which might be more critical

and more important in high-rise buildings, now

typically have call monitoring happening sixty

times per second. Thus, the controller can reassign elevator cars to respond to calls so much

more efficiently that we might reduce, say, a

high-rise elevator cab requirement from twenty

to eighteen and save square footage per floor. I

estimate that a $15,000 computer used in this

way in a thirty-story building would probably

increase the building’s value by $1 million

through savings in usable area. That is a big impact.

We are seeing a lot of digital thermostat control that gives absolute, pinpoint environmental

control. If you put 68° on your thermostat, then

that is what you will get. It will not be 69° or

67°, it will be 68°.

The fire alarm system will do far more than

indicate the fire on a lighted panel downstairs.

It will tell you what kind of fire is underway; it

is going to lock the stair doors getting into that

floor and open up the doors on the other floors;

and it is going to do a number of things which

can help with the fire fighting and save lives.

These things have been around for a while,

but they are getting more sophisticated, and as

I mentioned, they are coming more into the

spotlight.

Impacts and Trends
Richard Carl Reisman 33

Business services costs, as well as rental costs,

will now greet the tenant who walks in the door

of the speculative office building. The tenant is

looking for service as well as shelter. We do not

feel that as of today these services have given

‘smart’ buildings the edge for making deals versus buildings that have not had them. Indeed,

there are probably under one hundred ‘smart’

buildings up and running in the country right

now.

We do see it in five years as being a deal

breaker if the services are not provided. One

just would not go into a first-class office building that did not offer it. But, it is our view that,

while the tenant will be spending more through

his/her landlord and/or service provider, he/she

will have significantly improved performance

and efficiency to offset additional costs.

Office buildings will cost more to build, but

will make that money back by improved operating efficiencies and lower running costs. Also,

we will make money back because people who

build buildings have revenue opportunities to

resell services. These sophisticated buildings will

require more sophisticated people to take care

of them. People need to be technologically

trained. This is the shortage that we have right

now. We do not have people who can adequately run out and really service computer-oriented systems. That is coming around. That will

have to come around.

As an industry standard, a Class A office

building will have these higher floor-to-floor

heights, more expanded and more capable

HVAC systems, roof signal communications

and distribution for them through the building.

Integrated telecommunications systems provialed in the building will simply be a standard,

and also better acoustic design and more energy-con-scious design. Light standards, such as

glare reduction, all of these things are coming

to be higher, but expected, standards.

Mike Clevenger will show you the substantial

proportion of the stock of buildings that will

have to be retrofitted, but by far, most of those

buildings will be able to be retrofitted successfully. We will not have to junk all of our buildings, but a short history of retrofit automation

and many variables make predictions and price

estimating quite tricky.

For example, if there is a building that is

abandoned and there is no tenant and no ceilings, it’s quite easy to go in and wire that building in comparison to one that has ceilings and

tenants in, in which case there would be great

disruption, off-hours overtime and so on.

How much automation does a tenant use;

what are the sizes of floors; how old is the

building; what is the type of construction; what

is the adequacy of the existing electrical service;

what was the building used for before? A number of factors make quite complicated the task

of predicting retrofit costs in general.

We are doing a lot of it, and as 1 mentioned,

our most sophisticated automated example of

anything we have built in the last five years was

a retrofit condition, interestingly, in a new

building.

The new buildings, which were not wired by

the phone company, are perhaps the most demanding. The old buildings that had the embedded wire base have cable running around

the building you could hook into and run signals around. It is the recent buildings that do

not have the embedded wiring that you have to

be careful of.

The big impact then is that we are going to

have the more expensive projects being a sum

of the traditional shelter provision and the service unit, all better constructed and more automated. So, it is not only shelter, it is also

service, and that is what I want to emphasize

here.

So, the basis of change is here for our buildings, and we have seen a lot of it happen. Everybody is trying to get into the act, but we

now see this explosive mushroom ahead of us

compared to what we have had, and as that

takes over and as we really go crazy with office

automation revolution, we see a lot more

change coming in the future.

I would like to turn it over to Michael

Clevenger and Piero Patri to tell you what those

are.

Richard Carl Reisman is a Principal with Whisler-Patri,

an Architecture, Planning and Interior Design firm in

San Francisco.
34 Smart Office Buildings

Michael Clevenger

This paper is a short compendium outlining

the key points:

1.) The Office of the Future has arrived and

will result in fundamental shifts in the planning,

design, construction, and operation of speculative office buildings.

Up to the mid-1970s with the advent of the

micro-computer technology, office technology

had been confined to developments in telecommunications, centralized data processing, reprographics, and word processing. The impact of

these technologies on the work place were significant, but not revolutionary. From an office

design and construction standpoint, little change

to the building development process has occurred since the Second World War, with the

evolution of the high-rise office building. But

with the emergence of the micro-computer in

the mid-1970s, and the related developments in

advanced distributive processing, electronic

printing, local area networks, software, microwave and satellite communications, a profound

change in the very essence of the conventional

office development is now well underway. (Figure 1).

Another driving force that’s propelling this

change is the break up of AT&T on January 1,

1984. The deregulation of the telecommunications industry has created near chaos within the

local Bell company operating areas from the

standpoint of building wiring, and equipment

servicing. In effect, the building owner is now

able to directly capture telecommunications

(and related office service offerings) within his

captured tenant market. This ability to resell

communications services creates substantial

profit opportunities and risks for the building industry.

2.) The Key Components of the Office of the

Future.

The key communication and office automation technologies that are now converging on the

office building include:

• Electronic work stations from the most simple

personal computers, to high-performance professional workstations and word processors.

(Figure 2).

•■●

3.

These work stations are being integrated into

sophisticated digital telecommunication systems or PBX systems, allowing both local

area communication within the building as

well as communication into national and international networks. In parallel to telecommunication systems, these work stations are also

being integrated into high performance base

band and broad band local area network systems, allowing both high-speed data and video

transmission throughout the building. These

networks are gradually being integrated into

the telecommunication systems utilizing software that allows one system to interface with

the other. (Figure 3).

Attached to the network are shared electronic

services including high-speed electronic printers, file servers, and sophisticated, high-quality document scanning devices for document

input. (Figure 4).

Specialized application technologies are beginning to emerge on a shared basis, including video conferencing facilities, electronic

publishing centers, public access such as the

Source, and CompuServe, and satellite earth

stations that permit building tenants to access

directly long-distance communications systems thereby completely ‘bypassing’ the local

telephone operating company system at attractive reduced operating costs.

) The Growth in Office Automation Over the

Next Eight Years, Particularly the Growth of

Individual Electronic Workstations or Video

Display Units (VDU) Will Create Severe Physical and Operational Problems Within Existing

Office Structures Which Have Not Been Explicitly Designed for These New Technologies.

These problems will create significant shifts

in demand for commercial office space, both in

the location of offices, as well as the configuration and design of offices. Most importantly,

this change will also result in a shift in tenant

demand for new services as part of the building

tenant service offering. (Figure 5).

Some statistics in office automation growth:

■ At the end of 1982, there were nearly six million video display units in American industry.

By 1990, this number is expected to grow to

over forty million units in the U.S. alone, and
Michael Clevenger 35

SMART BUILDING

OVERVIEW

Figure 1
36 Smart Office Buildings

Figure 2

VIDEO DISPLAY UNITS

Time

Figure 3

AUTOMATION EQUIPMENT

IN WORKSTATIONS

Time

●

●

could reach eighty million units world wide by

the mid-1990s.

At Xerox, in 1983, there was roughly one

Video Display Unit for every ten employees.

By 1986, this ratio will drop to one VDU for

every four employees. By 1988, the ratio is

expected to be one VDU for every white collar employee throughout the Corporation.

While there is substantial growth in the number and type of computer terminals, and attendant peripherals, a very small percentage,

merely 5 percent of this growth can be accommodated in newly designed and built office structures over the next eight to ten

years. The bulk of this technology must be accommodated in existing office stock suggesting that substantial office redesign and

reconstruction will be required in the near

term. Over the longer term, the miniaturization of product, the advent of fiberoptic technology, and the increasing use of portable

(and potentially) wireless electronic

workstations will begin to ease the physical

pressures on the building envelope. Another

mitigating factor will be the growth of the remote or (home worker) employee work force.

Recent studies have forecasted that nearly 25

percent of the office work force (primarily

professional and clerical) will operate in some

form of remote location by 1992, This shift

will absorb a fair measure of the demand in

the early part of the next decade.

4.) The convergence of these technologies, as

well as deregulation of the telecommunications

industry, will establish the building owner as a

primary information vendor and systems integrator for the second half of the 1980s.

This convergence of the real estate industry

with the communications industry will rival, if

not exceed, the impact of the interstate highway system on the hotel, motel, shopping center,

suburban residential real estate, and recreation

industries. The convergence, however, will radically change the building development process

and the role of the building owner.

Each of the key participants and stakeholders

in the development process will be faced with a

fundamentally new set of planning issues to ensure a successful development project.
Michael Clevenger 37

m

■

■

m

■

●

The key issues relate to:

Changing technologies

Building obsolescence

Changing land values

Changing regulatory issues associated with

deregulation

Changing real estate markets as telecommunication technologies allow for developmerit in remote areas and greater migration of

back office operations from the downtown to

suburban centers.

Changing building operations associated with

the management of sophisticated building

communication systems and other shared tenant services.

The office tenants will increasingly demand

flexible building environments that will readily

adapt to changing technologies. Tenants will demand and most likely expect to share in the

economies of scale associated with telecommunications resale. Many tenants will require

that their office automation systems be compatible with the building systems and networks,

and that they can depend on the building operator for service maintenance and equipment replacement and upgrade.

The project lender will require assessments of

risk and opportunity associated with the hightech building. They will be concerned with

valuation as it relates to building obsolescence.

They will want to assess the effect of these

technologies on land values, and what changes

in demand and value will most likely occur over

time.

The appraiser will now have to update building and land valuation assumptions and methodologies to account for the effects of technology.

Assessments of income, cash flow, and discount

factors for risk will be required to recognize the

fundamental changes in both revenue and expense in the high-tech building.

The real estate broker and builder are now

confronted with a new product and new markets for their wares. An office building is now

an information utility and communication service center. it is an automation emporium, electronic conference center, and technology service

management center. It is a complex envelop of

information workers, networks, and technologies

Small Single

rTenant Office

Figure 4

Time

Figure 5

POWER AND WIRING IN WORKSTATIONS

Time
38 Smart Office Buildings

interacting in a highly dynamic mode. It is

these products that the broker must now understand in order to market effectively to a newly

emerging tenant base.

Finally, the developer/builder who is central

to this process must concern himself with all the

issues and perspectives of these issues outlined

above. The developer/builder must radically

change the development planning process to allow for an integrated approach to planning that

melds architectural design with systems design,

with applications design, into a business plan

that addresses tenant markets along communication, automation, and applications segments.

Feasibility studies will need to incorporate these

new business opportunities requiring new financial assumptions for risk and benefit. New partnerships between the developer, automation

vendors, service businesses, and telecommunication companies will need to be assessed. Site selection will have to be evaluated from the

standpoint of micro-wave and satellite reception/transmission performance. Regulatory constraints of local public utility commissions

relating to bypass and resale strategies will be

required. Tenant allowances relating to improvements for office automation will be a key element in the building pro-forma and marketing

plan. Studies of competitive activity in the

building’s market are essential for no other reaother reason than to assess the cost of doing

nothing in the new project. Most, if not all of

these considerations will apply in varying degrees for the retrofit and upgrade of existing

structures. (Figure 6).

5.) Summary

m

m

●

■

●

■

■

The office of the future has arrived!

The building owner/developer/builder will

become a key information vendor of the next

decade,

The building investor can expect significant

new profitability and risk with this highly dynamic and turbulent new business.

New partnerships will emerge between building owners and automation/communication

vendors.

Most of the explosive growth in office automation/communications will occur in existing

structures.

The key to success in the high-tech building

industry will be a radically updated planning

process which integrates the planning for real

estate development, telecommunications, office automation, and office services management.

The payoff for effectively planned projects

will be extraordinary.

Michael Clevenger is the Principal Technical Consultant in Real Estate Division of the Xerox Corporation,
Michael Clevenger 39

Figure 6

PLANNING CHECK LIST FOR THE HIGH TECH BUILDING

Technology Issue s

Telecommunications

Cablin g

Office Automation

Integratio n

Softwar e

Service s

cost s

Financing Issue s

Valuatio n

Assessment of Risk

Feasibilit y

Pay-bac k

Tax Implication s

Life Cycle Costing

Allocation of Costs

Break-even Analysis

Cost Estimatin g

Pricin g

Regulator y Issue s

Desire Issue s

Locatio n

Site Configuratio n

Building Configuratio n

Structural Desig n

Floor Configuratio n

Vertical/Horizontal Distributio n

Tenant Allowances

Flexibilit y

Antenna Siting

Building Systems

Operational Issue s

Vendor Selection

Technical Support

Maintenanc e

Tenant Support

Services Organizatio n

Marketing

Services Administratio n

Contract Administratio n

Local Practice s

Public Utility Commission Regulations

Re-sale Provision s

Tariff Structure s

FCC Actions

AT&T Settlement Impacts
40 Smart Office Buildings

Piero Patri

I am going to look at our crystal ball approximately through to the beginning of the 21st

Century, basing my predictions on 30 years of

experience — not in research — but in the

practice of architecture, planning, interior design and, more recently, in facilities management. I am aware of the research that is

currently underway at NBS, HUD and elsewhere and am a little awed by the research

power in attendance here. I fully expect to learn

a lot more today than I will teach anyone.

The subject of ‘smart’ buildings has been

something I have been involved in for a long

time. I have here articles that read, The Electronics Man In His New Office, and The Brave

New World With Home Electronics. They are

dated December 1972. Pete Valentine, President of Comsul Ltd., communications consultants, and I were interviewed then and talked

about the future of ‘smart’ buildings. It has

taken a little longer than we thought for these

ideas to come to reality, but the concepts have

obviously been around for a long time.

Today I will talk about, one, the future of

‘intelligent’ or ‘smart’ building technologies;

two, their general impacts; and three, their impact on the future of building construction and

related industries.

First, with regard to building technologies, I

think all agree that what Richard Reisman and

Michael Clevenger talked about earlier is not a

‘flash in the pan’ or ‘pie in the sky.’ It is not a

question of ‘if' but ‘when’ or ‘what form’ or

‘how,’ as Bob Gold said. The cost effectiveness

and demonstrated enhancement of productivity

from office automation clearly point to their increased future impact on how buildings will be

designed to facilitate their application. This,

along with reduced costs of building ownership

by means of sophisticated building systems, indicates that ‘smart’ building will be the rule —

not the exception — by the turn of the century.

Again, going back in my professional experience, I want to mention two related trends that

are merging with ‘smart’ building technologies,

and they are simply the utilization of factorybuilt components that have been developing for

years as a means of reducing construction costs

and time, as well as improving quality; and two,

flexible building systems to accommodate increasing organizational changes — that 37 percent a year churn that Michael Clevenger

talked about — and also the rapidly evolving

intelligent building technology.

We do not know precisely what the full impact of office automation and smart building

technology will be over the life of a building

ten, twenty or fifty years from now. So, as architects, we must build in flexibility or adaptability y.

I predict that the ‘smart’ building itself and

the trend toward factory-built components and

flexible building systems will merge to create a

building that will be qualitatively different from

the traditional building we see today.

I would like to take a moment to quote a

statement by Joseph Newman of Tishman Realty and Construction Company. “In the new

age of buildings, buildings will be better places

in which to work, live and interact. Buildings

will run more efficiently, be more responsive to

the needs of their occupants, and will more effectively accommodate the new high-tech tools

of business. More durable, better designed, easier to maintain, and higher-quality materials

and products will be utilized, A lot of this is

coming out of other areas like NASA and

space. In the new age of buildings, more attention will be paid to increased construction productivity and expeditious building cycles. Not

only will buildings be more intelligent, providing

more effective life safety, security, energy conservation, communications compatibility and

environmental control. Those who design, build,

manage and own buildings will be smarter.”

Well, what does that really mean? As you

might expect, these ‘smart’ buildings will become still smarter, and they will be active, not

passive. For example, the building management

systems, by means of sensors placed throughout

the building, will see, hear, smell, breathe,

move, think, prepare and react to changing

building conditions. AI, artificial intelligence, is

going to be another element that will eventually

contribute to buildings interacting with their

user. Buildings will not just sit there, passive, as

they have in the past. Actually, Arthur Clark’s

2002, I think, will turn out to be a pretty accu-
Piero Patri 41

rate guess. So we had better watch out for

HAL.

With the advent of speech recognition technology, voice commands will activate the lights

and air conditioning, or command a remote-controlled robotic element of a wall to move. And,

most importantly, speech recognition will make

the computer accessible to everybody and as

universal as the telephone. In other words, one

will not need to know how to type or anything

about computer programming. This is coming

very soon. There are already specialized pieces

of equipment on the market that are capable of

some level of both voice recognition and synthesis.

Clearly, these ‘smart’ buildings are going to

be more complex, and their elements may not

be all of the buzz words we are talking about,

but only those that really make sense. They will

be modular, standardized, integrated, miniaturized, light-weight, micro-environmentally controlled, and energy efficient.

The next practical step in ‘smart’ office

building design will probably be utilization of

raised access floors for wire as well as air distribution, which will provide individualized environmental controls for the user. This, along

with glare-reducing reflected ambient light will

create a whole new series of design opportunities for the office ceiling.

‘Smart’ buildings of the future will also be

highly flexible. That is the key word: easily

reconfigured, relocated or replaced. They will

take advantage of space technology and will be

precision built with the help of computer-assisted design combined with robotic manufacturing.

What we think of traditionally as the building elements — the furnishings and the electronic equipment — will all be wired together

to create an integrated continuum with no clear

distinction between them. This is the qualitative

change we think will take place. Walls will plug

into floors. Furniture and equipment will plug

into each other and then into walls, floors, and

ceilings. Everything will be pre-wired. In my review of the literature in preparing for this

presentation, it was interesting to note that a recent study showed that electrical work is one of

the areas where there seems the greatest potential for improvement in construction technology.

So the ‘smart’ building will be an information

utility, not just an enclosure of space. The entire

building will be like a piece of electronic equipment. For instance, with flat screen technology,

walls can become electronic displays either of

information or simply color and pattern, creating the possibility of changing the whole character of the office instantaneously.

Signal compression technology that is taking

the broad band width of video and reducing it

to utilize existing telephone wires will result in

every telephone having a video screen so every

call will be a video teleconference, if desired.

In the future, other building types will be

‘smart,’ not just office buildings. For instance,

more working, shopping and learning will take

place at home with the help of computer and

video networks. Donald Sullivan of Arthur D.

Little sees the automated house of the future

being smaller and containing fewer objects,

with robots moving walls and furnishings to accommodate different needs. In other words, the

house itself is a robot.

Professor Carolyn Dry of the University of Illinois has studied how the ‘intelligent’ house can

physically adapt to the various needs of the disabled and the elderly, compensating for limited

strength and mobility. Japanese researchers are

already working on robots to move hospital patients in and out of beds.

Hotels have also started to be ‘smart,’ tracking when you are in your room and when you

have left for improved security, providing fingertip control of the room’s environment, and

maximizing effective management by providing

up-to-the-minute billing information at checkout

and alerting the front desk as soon as the room

is available for the next lodger.

‘Intelligent’ buildings will probably be more

expensive because of their complexity, even

though they will be computer-designed with

very efficient use of materials and to minimal

tolerances. Shorter construction times and the

tendency of electronic equipment to go down in

cost will probably help to keep costs in line.

In any case, any greater cost will be more

than compensated over the long term of ownership by the added capabilities in building maintenance and user productivity. The
42 Smart Office Buildings

demonstrated enhancement of productivity

through office and building technology has already increased corporate interest in ‘smart’ facilities. Now a Facilities Manager can prove to

the CEO that spending money to make a building ‘smart’ clearly has added value to the company’s bottom line.

In terms of the general impacts, almost all

new buildings in the future will be ‘smart’ to

some degree, and many existing buildings will

be retrofitted to be ‘smart.’ Telecommunications

will continue its decentralizing effect. Particularly because it is not only moving back offices

out to the suburbs, it is also moving office work

into the home. So, I think not only will we have

more suburban sprawl, we will probably also

witness rural sprawl.

Video teleconferencing will eventually come

into its own. Its promise up to now has not been

fulfilled, but it clearly is coming and will no

doubt reduce business air travel and affect the

hotel industry as well.

In general, therefore, regional land use, employment, density and transportation, as well as

land values, will be affected. It should be noted

that complex telecommunication technology has

some centralizing aspects whose impact on

land-use distribution has yet to be fully felt. I

think in the last decades of the 20th Century,

access to telecommunications channels, such as

teleports and fiber-optic highways, will be as

important to development as access to rivers

and bodies of water were in earlier centuries,

and access to freeways and airports are now.

Availability of sophisticated telecommunications will change the way we use and value

land, giving new meaning to the real-estate adage ‘location, location, location.’

There is no question in our minds that there

will be other significant economic impacts. In

describing the buildings of the future, I suggested that there will be an integrated continuum of building elements — walls, ceilings,

floors, furnishings and electronic equipment all

wired together into an information utility. I

have suggested that most of it will be manufactured, pre-wired, and ‘assembled’ at the site.

This could imply the merging of the construction and furnishing industries with the telecommunication and computer industry. The

construction industry, even though fragmented,

is the largest industry in the United States,

contributing over 200 billion dollars a year to

the GNP and employing 10 percent of the U.S.

workforce. To quote Marvin Citron of Forecasting International, “Telecommunications has

been the fastest-growing industry in the world

every year for the last 10 years and will be the

largest industry in the world and will have

touched and changed the lives of most of the

people living when the century ends.”

What we may witness is the merging of the

largest existing industry in the U.S. with our

largest emerging industry. Inevitably, this will

have enormous impacts on the way buildings

get built, and organization and ownership of the

construction industry, and the number and type

of jobs in it.

Richard Reisman mentioned earlier that

IBM has expanded into the furniture business

and Honeywell has diversified its services. Another important example of this merging is represented by Steelcase Furniture Company’s

acquisition of Dorm Architectural Products,

manufacturers of totally-integrated wall, floor

and ceiling systems. This is a logical expansion

for a furniture manufacturer because, in the future, everything will be linked together. Following the pattern of other manufacturing

industries, such as automobiles and now computers, I foresee there will be fewer and larger

corporations in the construction business, and

these companies will be highly automated,

more capital intensive, and less labor intensive.

How will this impact construction jobs?

There will be fewer traditional construction

jobs, as I have already mentioned, with less

field work, although there is a bright spot in

terms of retrofitting existing buildings to accommodate this new office technology. Even

though there’s less field work, more work will

be done in the factory, but most of that work

will be done by robots. So there will be a cap

on factory jobs.

Clearly the need for skilled technicians will

increase; that is, white- and gray-collar jobs will

increase, while blue-collar jobs will diminish.

This also applies to the operation and maintenance industries as well. The maintenance

worker in overalls with a hammer sticking out
Piero Patri 43

of his pocket, walking around in the bowels of a

building, will become a technician in a white

coat, sitting at a console, checking readouts.

The practice of architecture will change and

tend to merge with industrial design and engineering as a result of buildings becoming products of industrial design and a manufacturing

process. CAD will increase in sophistication

with professional expertise programmed into the

computer system as described by Harry Mileaf

earlier.

The good news is that some new jobs will

also be created. There is clearly a need for more

design engineers, architects and industrial engineers, more CAD specialists, ‘smart’ building

retrofitters, laser, electronic, and fiber-optic specialists. We in interior design also see a greater

demand for the handiwork of artists and artisans in response to the ‘high-tech/high-touch’

needs of the electronic office worker.

The bad news is fewer jobs for field construction workers and no increased need for factory

workers. Problems will exist for traditional architects and drafters and for blue-collar building operations and maintenance people.

Michael Clevenger mentioned the reductions in

the users of these ‘smart’ office buildings from

the ranks of the clerical and the middle-management people whose jobs will be automated.

I cannot predict whether the net result of

new jobs will balance the old jobs and what effect expanding industries like leisure and health

care will have. If we are to believe some predictions that by the year 2000 four million jobs

will be taken over by computers, there will

clearly be significant changes in employment

patterns that will certainly affect the building

industry.

Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that

significant retraining and even re-educating will

be required for workers within the construction

industry, as well as those forced out of other

traditional professions I mentioned.

The U.S. construction industry currently

seems fragmented and ill-prepared to deal with

this upcoming problem. Crucial to success will

be a suitably educated and trained workforce

and a coordinated research and development effort by the U.S. construction industry to develop and disseminate appropriate technology.

I have already mentioned the problem of the

lack of compatibility between equipment and

the lack of coordination between regulatory

agencies. To be successful in this transition, we

must also deal with the problem of the de-skilling and dehumanizing of some of these jobs

and the resultant growth in job dissatisfaction

among the electronic-office workforce, a

workforce that will be better educated, with

more job mobility and higher expectations, and

a greater willingness to voice dissatisfactions

with employers and work conditions, including

litigation.

Just to touch a moment on foreign competition, it is clear that the other industrialized nations have a better-educated workforce in the

areas of engineering and manufacturing. As an

example, the Japanese graduate several times

the number of engineers per year that we do.

They are world leaders in robotics and appear

to be ahead of us in computer-controlled, factory-built housing. Therefore, as more building

construction takes place in the factory, they will

be extremely competitive.

To summarize, by the 21st Century we are

clearly going to be in the Information Technology Age and the Industrial Age will be over.

There may be a lot of potential scenarios, but it

is clear that this change is going to have profound impacts on the building industry. Specifically, buildings are going to be incredibly

‘smart,’ complex, active environments and

costly.

Secondly, ‘smart’ buildings are going to be

everywhere, and not just ‘smart’ offices, but

‘smart’ homes, hotels, hospitals, etc. They will

impact land use, density and transportation. In

other words, they will impact our whole society

and the way in which we function.

Thirdly, we believe we will see the merging

to some significant extent of two mammoth industries, construction and telecommunications,

with a net loss of jobs and an increased demand

for highly-skilled technicians and, with this, the

need for re-education and retraining.

Lastly, it is really exciting to be here to address this pressing need in the construction industry. I hope this forum will continue because

over the next several years. We must carefully

coordinate government policy and private indus-
44 Smart Office Buildings

try goals to fully realize the enormous potential

these forces promise.

Some After-Thoughts

There is a pressing need for a better-coordinated research effort in the U.S. Construction

Industry. This effort should involve the full

range of people in construction: design professionals, building material and furniture manufacturers, contractors, building owners,

academics, telecommunications and office automation manufacturers and service providers, as

well as government officials. There is also a

fundamental need for more indepth studies on

productivity gains attributable to the implementation of office automation and telecommunications systems, especially at the middle

management level of organizations.

This research and exchange should serve as

the basis for the development of a national policy regarding the future of the Construction Industry, particularly as it relates to the computer

and telecommunications industry. It would be

my hope that this Committee would serve as an

impetus toward accomplishing that goal.

Piero Patri is President of Whisler-Patri, an Architecture, Planning and Interior Design firm in San Francisco.
Modular Structures and

Related Techniques

Don O. CarIson

Eric Dluhosch

Don O. Carlson

I want to very quickly cover the background

of light-frame residential construction. A brief

look at history, a look at where we are today,

and some looks at where we might go and the

possible impacts.

The biggest change that we had in this nation in housing was when a guy by the name of

Taylor, a carpenter in Chicago, created what

we call balloon framing — the first use of twoby-fours in 1833. This was the major departure

from the old European system of heavy timbers

and heavy masonry construction.

Strange as it looks, that system really turned

the United States into a nation of homeowners.

One hundred seven years later in 1940 in Lafayette, Indiana, Jim and George Price came up

with factory panelization. About twelve years

after that in 1952, this man, A. Carroll Sanford,

invented what we call the toothed metal connector plate, This created the component industry, which in a sense allowed site builders to

compete with what was going on inside factories

by panelizers.

About 1973, the next big breakthrough was

the flat-chord floor truss, again, metal-plate connected. Simple as it looks, it enabled us to

greatly conserve our natural resources by making it unnecessary to use heavy-dimension lumber in our floor systems.

If you think about America’s industrialized

housing machine and visualize down the center

of that picture a big piece of machinery, there

are five manufacturing segments. At the far

left, we have what we call the production

builder, the big-volume site builder; next, the

panelized-home manufacturer. Across from that

we have the mobile-home manufacturer, the

modular-home manufacturer, and the compo

nent manufacturer.

As to who builds what in the U.S. housing

pie, these figures are based on our research for

1983. The site builders do about 51 percent; the

panelized, 26 percent; the mobile, which we

probably should more accurately call the HUDCode home today, builds 19 percent; modulars

about 4 percent. Other segments of this industry include the dealers for the factory-built

homes, the component manufacturers who build

for the production builders, and of course the

special-unit manufacturers, who are all factory

builders, but they don’t build housing. They

build everything else except homes and apartments.

The production builder builds single-family

homes, low-rise or garden apartments up to

mid-rise apartments. We call him a production

builder because he usually builds in metro centers, and one house after another. In the metro

center, he is served by the component manufacturer who usually sells these units erected. In

other words, when the component truck leaves

that house, it’s weathered in and the builder

can take one month to a year to finish the inside, if he wishes.

Turning to the component manufacturer, this

industry was created by Sanford; today there

are two thousand of these companies across the

country, primarily serving production builders.

They are among the most sophisticated machine people because they will serve up to one

hundred different builders at one time.

Component manufacturers make wall panels,

roof trusses, floor trusses, gable ends, plus other

components for homes. They use highly sophisticated machinery. This $52,000 component

cutter could be compared to a carpenter with a

hand saw over his knee at a job site or even a

circular saw. There’s not much comparison

when it comes to the kind of quality you can

get into a factory to the lack of quality in our,

as someone said, primitive methods at job sites.

Component manufacturers all make roof

trusses. Today this roof truss is engineered for

the specific house in the specific area where it’s

going to be used, for span, wind load, snow

load, live load, dead load and so on. It’s created

with metal connector plates. You see the inverted truss there in the background.

Additionally, the industry is becoming more

sophisticated. Here they’re using what we call

machine-stress rated lumber. This is lumber

that’s run through a nondestructive testing ma-
Figure 1

Hud-Code (Mobile)

Home.

When built to the Manufactured Housing Construction and Safety

Standards Code, administered by the Department of Housing &

Urban Development, and

placed on a permanent

foundation on land

which IS sold with the

home, this variety of

housing becomes virtually indistinguishable

from any other type of

housing, except that the

unit will be more affordable, ranging in price

from 5 percent to 30 percent less than other

styles of housing in the

same area,

Figure 2

Finished Panelized

Home.

Panelized home manufacturers, approximately

600 across the U. S., are

the most versatile producers of architectural

styles. Their homes can

range from low-cost vacation cabins to expensive mansions in excess

of 10,000 square feet.
48 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

chine to actually find out how much it will

bear. This puts this industry’s products on a

part with steel and concrete.

Component manufacturers also machine

doors literally by the thousands. Turning next to

the panelized-home manufacturer, there are

about six hundred of these companies — of

which probably twenty-five are large size.

They’re very versatile in what they build. They

can take an architect’s blueprint and create the

house that the customer wants. One of the largest plants happens to be in Fort Payne, Alabama, the old Kingsbury Home plant, probably

half a million square feet under roof.

Today, the important thing to remember regarding all of these phases of housing that we’re

discussing is that it is a duplicative process.

We’re all building the same way. Two-by-four

studs, usually sixteen inches on center.

In the panelized plant, if a panel such as this

would have sheathing on it, windows inserted,

siding on the outside, and then it’s delivered to

the job site in that condition, even though

there’s insulation between the studs, we call it

‘open-panel,’ or ‘open-panel panelization.’ If that

wall panel is finished on the inside and the wiring, plumbing, and so on is put inside that wall,

then it becomes closed-panel.

Some of our panelizers use cores, mechanical

cores. This little self-contained building will contain one or two bathrooms, the furnace, the hotwater heater, and usually the electrical junction

box. That structure goes down on the deck first,

and then the interior and exterior partitions and

the roof system goes up around it.

Also included in this panelized industry, even

though they don’t build panels, are the two-byfour pre-cutters; and we do include the loghome manufacturers, of which there’s about

two hundred and fifty. We also include the

dome-home manufacturers in the panelized segment, of which there are around sixty, Now,

the dome manufacturers actually panelize using

five triangles to create a pentagon.

Turning now to the modular home manufacturers, like the panelizers, the log, and the

dome, they build to our model building codes;

that is, a conventional building code. There are

about two hundred modular manufacturers

across the nation. Their technique in construction is very similar to what goes on in a mobilehome plant, except they’re building to different

codes.

This is a typical kind of jig they use for their

roof system.

Here’s one of the newer plants which happens to be Summey Corp. down in Georgetown,

Texas. Their technique is to fabricate their

walls on wall-panel machines at the head end of

the line and then tip them up onto the floor systems as they go down the production line; and

then in the far background, you see the modular boxes, as we call them, getting ready to be

shipped out of the plant,

The technique in many plants flows along a

production line with fourteen to sixteen stations.

The flooring systems are stacked up there at

the right. They put down their resilient flooring

and their carpeting. They put in their plumbing

fixtures, interior partitions, exterior walls and a

roof system as the units go down the factory

line.

Modulars are about 95 percent complete

when they leave the factory if they are going to

be a single-family house. We call the modular

the strongest of all construction systems used to

day simply because it’s glue-nailed, plywood

construction all the way around. Even the marriage wall has plywood glue-nailed onto the wall

studs. This makes each half of the house essentially a self-contained box beam, and the

modulars are traditional over-builders. If it

takes two two-by-fours to do the job, they’ll use

three.

At the job site, if the terrain is rough, they’ll

place them with cranes. Now, that wet wall of a

modular will weigh up to twenty-six-thousand

pounds, and yet, as you can see, it’s being to

tally supported by cables at just two points.

A major trend along the coast, the East

Coast of the US. and the Gulf Coast, is what

we call the stacked modular, up to five or six

stories tall. These units are sold primarily now

as recreational condominiums. They’re very,

very attractive.

As in all industrialized construction, which

covers all of these units, the biggest saving is in

your construction loan interest costs. A project

of this magnitude, if it’s modular, can be finished in about six months compared to about a
Don O. Carlson 49

cut construction time

from more than one year

to less than six months

with resultant interest

cost savings.
50 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

year if it’s site-built; and a project of this size

will probably save up to $100,000 per month on

construction loan interest costs.

Finally, the HUD code manufactured home,

which we used to call the mobile home. Of

course, they’ve not been mobile for many, many

years. This industry has two of the greatest advantages going for it ever visited on any segment of housing: one, it has a national

preemptive building code; and two, as of about

the middle of last summer, you could finance

these units just like conventional real estate,

providing they were permanently mounted on

foundations on their own lot.

Trends in this industry are to make these

units look more and more house-like, to make

them more appealing to the consumer/buyer.

Construction technique is the same as we use

for anything else, two-by-four studs, sixteen

inches on center. In this case, you can see

they’re getting their shear strength from gluenail on the interior materials. However, when it

comes to insulation, you can order what you

want — R-1 1 or R-19 walls.

One of the departures is lighter frame construction than we use in most other housing.

Like in this particular mono-roof system,

they’re using two-by-threes instead of two-byfours. Well, the question is: What do you want

to buy, a Chevrolet or a Cadillac? These homes

are in the Chevrolet class.

Going down the production line, they’re similar to the modular production lines: the floor

system first; then their plumbing, partitions,

wall systems and roof systems put on at the

end.

By law, the mobile must have a metal chassis

beneath it, and you can identify them if you can

get down underneath to see that it has a metal

chassis. If you see this, you know that it’s a

HUD-Code unit.

Manufactured-home dealers — there are

around fifteen thousand of these dealers (probably nine thousand handle mobiles), and the rest

are into panelized, combination mobile-modular,

the log, the dome, and so on.

The special-unit manufacturer, as I mentioned earlier, is a factory builder. He builds

things like doctors’ offices, prisons, motels, everything except private housing per se.

One of the difficulties in marketing today is

to tell the difference between a modular unit,

which is what we’re looking at here. Those units

beneath it are not chassis — they’re transporters. They’ll go back to the job site after this

unit is set at the site.

Here’s the mobile, or HUD-Code, home.

Both mobiles and modulars have house-type siding, roofing, windows, and doors. They’ve got

three and four 12-roof pitches. They look like

little houses, but depending on the market

you’re in, the mobile (HUD-Code) homes are

going to run anywhere from 10 to 35 percent

less costly than the site-built, comparable unit.

They’re striving to make these HUD-Code

homes appealing to the consumer. And when

these units are placed on permanent foundations, such as this particular project in Rancho

Ventura, California, which went on permanent

foundations and was sold with the lot, they look

good; but the price in that area, even though it

might sound high to you, was $71,000 to

$91,000. A comparable site-built house started

at $130,000. As you might guess, they sold like

hotcakes.

The interiors of HUD-Code units are very

professionally decorated today. The kitchens use

brand-name appliances. If there’s a choice, of

course, between good, better and best, they

probably go for the good because we’re talking

low-cost housing.

Other Trends in Our Industry: Because of

the rise of the component industry, the computer has been used for many, many years

(over twenty) because every roof truss we build

has to be engineered on a computer. Today

we’re getting computers into wall panelization.

In this case, a girl can look at a builder’s blueprint and do the input into this computer. The

computer will actually drive this wall-panel machine out in Gardina, California; and that machine will turn out walls for a three-bedroom

house in about three-and-a-half hours. However,

it’s limited. They can’t build gable-end walls

such as this. So there are many other semi-auto

mated systems of wall panelization. This is just

one. It happens to be a wall-panel plant in

Chino, California.

The high-speed plotter has already replaced

draftsmen to a great degree inside our compo-
Don O. Carlson 51

Figures 5 and 6

Log Homes and Dome

Homes

are considered part of

the panelized home

group There are approximately 250 log

home manufacturers in

the U.S. and Canada,

mostly small firms, and

about 60 dome home

manufacturers While

greatly desired by some

consumers, the total

number of units of both

built each year IS less

than 150,000
52 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

nent plants. That high-speed plotter is computer

driven, and it can do the work of about five

draftsmen in about an hour.

One of the minor trends through the South

(Louisiana, Texas), is what we call metal-plateconnected rough openings. It’s one of the toughest jobs at a job site to get a square opening for

your windows and doors, and this component

solves that problem for most of the apartments

being built down in the Texas area.

Another trend that we expect to see more of

because it makes so much sense is the permanent wood foundation, sometimes called the allweather wood foundation. This is made from

pressure-treated lumber and plywood; and as

you can see by this scene, you can build it anytime, including in a blizzard. You don’t have to

worry about what the climate is outside.

The permanent wood foundation creates a

basement level that is just as livable as the upstairs. And, depending on where you are and

what insulation is being done, this unit will

range anywhere from 20 to 50 percent less

costly to heat in the basement area. Since this

was invented by NAHB and a few other groups

back in 1969, we’ve built about one hundred

seventy thousand of these. We expect them to

proliferate.

Another trend is that the big builders are getting bigger. These figures show the top one hundred home builders. Now, these top one

hundred cut across all lines that I’ve mentioned.

In 1982, they built 304,000 units; in 1983,

377,000 units. The percentage of what they

built went down, as it always does, during a period of prosperity in housing simply because

more small builders come into the marketplace.

Japan — let me just touch on that briefly. I

led a study mission to Japan in April of this

year. When I left this country, I was very smug

about our superiority in housing technique, marketing, manufacturing, and so on. It took about

a day and a half for those ideas to get knocked

out of my head. My conclusion today is that

they’re about eight to ten years ahead of us in

marketing techniques and manufacturing technology.

This is how they sell their homes. You’re

looking at an aerial view of a model city

wherein sixty to seventy builders bring their

homes into one place. Mr. and Mrs. Japanese

Home Buyer can go in there. After they pick

out the architectural design and their house

style, they can sit down with a salesman at a

computer, do the final analysis right on that

computer, literally draw the house on the computer. Then they can go in a make selections of

all of their wall finishes, what color they want

the kitchen cabinets and so on.

If the order is finally approved, the salesman

can punch a button on the computer, and the

order is electronically transmitted to the factory, and the house starts down the production

line.

In terms of code, they have a national code

set by the Ministry of Construction. They want

their homes to not only be energy efficient, but

capable of standing up to earthquakes, their typhoons and so on. Of the ten largest Japanese

companies, about four have capabilities of completely testing the total house inside their lab

oratories.

This machine is capable of hitting that fullsize house with winds and rains of 140 miles per

hour, and those windows don’t blow out.

In terms of conveyorization and automation

in the factory, they’re much further advanced

than we are. That happens to be a wood panel,

a stressed-skin wood panel plant up in Matsumoto, Japan. That production line went at a

steady rate of fourteen feet per minute; it literally never stopped. Every station was controlled

by a sidebar computer, which in turn was controlled by a master computer.

They’re deeply into robotics for the steel panels they build. This is a robotic unit to create

steel trusses. They wouldn’t let us photograph

the wall-panel system, but it was all robotically

welded. The members came down very, very

quickly; went into a system where eight robotic

welders hit it all at one time and then moved

the panel out; and it only took a matter of a few

seconds to create a complete steel-wall panel.

The Manager in that plant told me very gleefully, “We’re building houses the way we build

cars.”

This is a new material invented by Misawa

Homes. That white panel you see at the end

they call precastable autoclave light weight ceramics, or more simply PALC. The PALC
Don O. Carlson 53

Figures 7 and 8

The Major Trend

among HUD-Code (mobile) homes is to make

them look more and

more like ‘conventional

site-built dwellings. ’ The

top photo shows how

panelized garages can

be placed in front of double-section HUD-Code

homes to make them

look like typical California

tract homes; the lower

photo shows that the

‘conventional home look’

is even being adapted

for single-section homes.
54 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

panel in one unit there gives you your exterior

finish, your interior finish, your structural support, vapor barrier, and insulation.

In talking with all of these Japanese companies, I naturally asked the question: What are

you going to do regarding the U. S.? They all

said, “We’re not going to do what we did to you

in automobiles, However, we would like to form

partnerships with major U.S. companies and

bring our technology to the U. S.”

Misawa claims they will have a factory in

this country within three years.

Even by Western standards, what they’re

building is attractive.

Today we already know how to build affordable houses which are also affordable to operate, even with present levels of technology,

without going into a sophisticated $20,000 solar

system. This is a building we built in

Carpinteria, California, to house our office facilities. It has an all-weather wood foundation, a

heat pump, an air-to-air heat exchanger; and, to

make a long story short, we run thirty-seven

items of electrical equipment, twenty-four

lights, and the heating, the air conditioning, the

furnace fan and the air-to-air heat exchanger

fans, and the whole ball of wax, costs us about

$2.50 a day to operate.

The foundation was built in a factory in two

days or — pardon me — one day by two men

who had never seen a wood-foundation blueprint before. The building was built in a factory

in eight days. The foundation went in on the

ground in one day, and the building was set in

about a half a day.

But then as we always say, building at the

site is ‘building by surprise.’ So after the building was set, it took us eight weeks to move in

simply because the environmental people in the

area wouldn’t let us move in until every single

blade of grass was planted, and they picked out

the blades they wanted planted.

Possible Changes and Impacts: As I mentioned, Japan is eight to ten years ahead of us

in CAD/CAM manufacturing, controls, conveyorization, automation, and robotics. They do

want to form U.S. partnerships, and I think, if

nothing else, we need some sort of a study to

cope with what’s going to happen in terms of

their future intentions in housing in the U.S.

Other Possible Changes and Impacts: We

now have one national preemptive building

code. That’s the HUD Manufactured Housing

Construction and Safety Standards. We have

three model codes, which are used by the rest

of the nation — the basic, the uniform and the

standard. Beyond that, there’s anywhere from

seven to actually fifteen thousand local or regional jurisdictions that decide on what goes

into a house. I think what we need is a national

preemptive building code, performance-oriented

to certain locations, revised to include known

methods of cost-cutting (the NAHB has a library on what we already know about cost-cutting), and the new performance code can be

merged to include the three model codes and

the one HUD Code.

We probably need a similar national preemptive zoning and infrastructure code. Using the

known techniques of cutting down costs in sub

divisions, this would cover things like streets,

sidewalks, sewers and so on; this, I think, would

be one of the major methods we could use to reduce costs of housing in the U.S.

Today we have a Department of Housing

and Urban Development. It never seemed to me

that was a logical marriage, simply because

there’s not an awful lot in common between the

two. When you’re talking about urban development, you’re talking probably about rehabilitation. You’re talking about heavy construction,

old infrastructure. Housing deals with things

that will go further out in the country. It may

make sense, therefore, to divide the two.

Additionally, we have no less than three Government agencies who get their fingers into the

housing pie with inspections, mortgage insurance and so on, Perhaps the time has come to

merge the FHA, the VA, and the Farmers

Home Administration and their separate codes

under the Department of Housing and have a

separate Department of Urban Development to

concentrate on revitalization, primarily through

free-enterprise zone systems.

It seems to me the only way we’re going to

be able to rebuild our cities is the way we built

them in the first place. They were built in the

first place literally like free-enterprise zones.

Other Possible Changes and Impacts: The

Japanese are well along in working toward util-
Don O. Carlson

*

55

Figures 9 and 10

A Major Problem

facing the housing industry today IS the inability of people both within

and outside of the industry to discern the difference visibly between

double-section HUDCode (mobile) homes,

shown in the above

photo, and double-section modular homes,

shown in the lower

photo Mobile homes are

built to the HUD-Code,

modular homes are built

to any one of the three

national ‘model’ builder

codes which in turn have

been adopted by states

and cities. In general the

modular homes are built

with a much heavier

framing system than IS

used by the mobilehome industry The major difference is in the

fact that, by law, the

HUD-Code (mobile)

home must have an integral metal chassis beneath each section; the

modular section, on the

other hand, IS simply delivered on a flatbed trailer

which is returned to the

plant after setting Nevertheless, since both units

are beginning to use

conventionally-pitched

roofs, house-type siding,

windows, and doors, it is

visually most difficult to

discern differences The

major difference IS in

cost where the mobile IS

built to meet the Chevrolet budget, and the modular IS more like the

Buick or Chrysler budget
56 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

ity self-sufficient homes and apartments. If we

tap Mother Earth and Father Sun, I don’t think

it’s too far a conclusion to come to that we can

eventually, not too many years down the road,

have a home or an apartment complex that’s totally self-sufficient of utilities.

I think one of the solutions to our energy

problem is right under our feet where, you

know, if you go down into the earth, regardless

of where you are, even three or four feet, you

hit an even temperature, which is always

warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer.

We’re tapping this in the building in

Carpinteria, and I think that’s one of the reasons that our heating and energy costs have

been so low.

Also, we’ve got to mentally reposition our

trees to be renewable and harvestable large-corn

stalks, and not just museum pieces. The American forests have to be repositioned in our minds

to be enclaves of multiple use rather than just a

low-use bank vault for two or three people that

hike into the wilderness forests every year.

Perhaps we should consider home projects or

communities for the homeless. How many

homeless are there? You hear figures ranging

from three hundred thousand to three million.

Who can count the homeless? You can’t find

them. The point is there are a lot of them out

there. Perhaps some of these families should be

allowed to involve themselves and build their

own experimental low-cost homes; and there’s

all kinds of experimental systems that we could

use, whether adobe, pre-cut logs, dog-bone (profile) lumber, etc. It maybe possible to develop

systems that we could export to underdeveloped

countries.

Other Changes and Impacts: I think we need

a national 10 percent home mortgage plan. It’s

axiomatic that when housing is going up, the

country’s prosperity goes up and vice versa.

Why should we continue to crucify the American economy on a destructive down cycle of

new home construction?

Our present mortgage interest tax deduction

system has been historically insufficient to head

off recessions in this nation. If we had this 10

percent plan aimed at the first-time buyer, I

think we could achieve a steady rate of two million starts every year. This would bolster 330

groups of separate businesses and industries

that depend on housing for a large share of

their cash income. Literally tens of thousands

of individual companies are involved in these

330 groups.

It would obviously increase employment and

certainly increase the Government’s tax income

at all levels, helping to reduce the deficit, and, I

think, finally head off recessions and possible

social upheavals that could occur if too many

people are homeless.

Don O. Carlson is Editor & Publisher of Automation in

Housing and Manufactured Home Dealer Magazine
Don O. Carlson 57

Figures 11 and 12

Construction

of all homes in the

United States today IS a

duplicative process

since all types of residential buildings are

made with 2x4 stud

walls spaced 16” o.c., for

all exteriors These

photos show typical production scenes in a mobile home plant. In the

bottom photo, the

worker IS shown spreading glue on studs to

which gypsum drywall or

wood paneling will be

glued and nailed This is

how a HUD-Code home

wall achieves a major

portion of its shear

strength from external

glue nailed sheathing,

which the mobile industry does not use Production steps for mobile and

modular homes within

their respective factories

are quite similar
58
Don O. Carlson

Figure 15

59

Aerial View

of one of the nation’s

largest panelized home

factories, Kingsberry

Homes, Fort Wayne, AL,

which is in excess of

100,000 square feet. Participants in the nation’s

panelized home industry

number over 600, but

range from huge plants

of this size down to

small retail lumberyards

which panelize homes

for preferred builders.

Figure 16

Non-Destructive Testing of lumber for

strength qualities now is

being performed by a

number of lumber producers for the component industry. The

independent component

manufacturer, which

makes major house parts

for site builders, needs

Machine Stress Rated

lumber for critical roof

truss projects such as

nursing homes, commercial buildings and

schools, and homes with

unusually large clearspan

trusses.
60 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Figure 17

Floor Trusses,

made of 2x4’s and

joined with metal connector plates on both

sides of each 2x4 member, are now used in

about 80 percent of US.

homes and apartments.

Floor truss actually is a

misnomer because

these ‘flat-chord’ trusses

often are used for roofceiling systems.

Figure 18

Component

Manufacturers

often assemble wall panels in the factory for use

by site builders. Approximately 30 percent of the

site-built homes and

apartments utilize wall

panels made by the nation’s 1,800 component

fabricators.
Don O. Carlson

Figure 19

Component

Fabricators

also machine door

blanks to order for production builders. They

install the windows to order, put in the hinges,

put in the lock sets, and

pre-hang the door in its

frame before delivery to

the site builder.

Figure 20

Wall Panel Machines

used by component fabricators today are capable of making straight

walls or gable end walls.
62 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Figure 21

Component

Fabricators are among

the most sophisticated in

terms of machining, and

many use high-speed

component cutters

(saws) as seen in this

photo which are capable

of five angle cuts on the

ends of 2x4 members at

the rate of 60 pieces per

minute. In-plant quality

today far exceeds quality

at the job site,

Figure 22

About 95 Percent

of all component fabricators make roof trusses,

and this is a mirror of the

roof systems for single

family homes and apartments in the U.S. today,

These triangular trusses

all are engineered for the

specific in a specific

geographic area by computer.
Don O. Carlson 63

Figure 23

Some Component

manufacturers use computer-driven, high-speed

Kellner wall panel machines which are capable of turning out walls

Figure 24

All Styles

of in-plant home builders

today use simple or elaborate cutting departments to prepare

members for wall panels,

roof trusses and floor

trusses
64 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Figure 25

A Typical

wall panel production

line for either a component plant or a panelized

home manufacturer may

consist of a steel-topped

or wood-topped production table with roller conveyors on both sides.

Some wall panel machines are totally fabricated of steel, and

contain lugs to hold 2x4

members in position

while they are pneumatically nailed. When a wail

IS finished on one side it

is said to be built by an

‘open-panel panelizer;

when a wall is finished

on both sides (and has

plumbing and electrical

inside) it is said to be a

‘closed-panel’ panelizer

Figure 26

Mechanical Core

Structures

are made by both

panelizers and component plants. The selfcontained structures

have a completely finished bathroom, the hotwater heater, the

furnace, electrical junction box, and sometimes

the wet wall for the adjoining kitchen. By doing

all of this electrical and

plumbing work inside a

plant, the in-plant producer can save from

$300 to $1,500 over the

cost of plumbing and

electrical work done at

the site. In construction,

the mechanical core

structure is placed on

the deck of the home or

the concrete slab first,

then the panelized home

IS erected around it.
Don O. Carlson 65

Figure 27

More and More Plants

today are multiple purpose plants. This factory

in Austin (Georgetown),

TX, produces both modular units and panelized

units.

Figure 28

Jigs Are Used

in both mobile and modular plants for fabrication

of complete ‘half-house’

ceiling systems, which

when complete, are

transported by crane to

the house production

line and set in place on

top of the half-house

box.
66 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Figure 29

Some Modular Plants

build their homes with

both sections joined together to insure perfect

fits. At the end of the

production line, the two

halves of the house are

split apart for transport

to the job site. All modular homes are heavily

sheathed with plywood,

and they usually are built

with unusually heavy

floor decking and roof

sheathing.

Figure 30

A Small Office

Building, built to resemble a home but partitioned like an office, was

built in a mobile home

plant in San Bernardino,

CA, in eight days. Its

wood foundation was

placed in the ground in

one day, and the building was set on the foundation in one day. This

structure could have

been occupied in less

than three days after delivery to the site.
Don O. Carlson 67

Figure 31

Many of the Nation%

component manufacturers located near metropolitan centers sell their

major house parts

‘erected. ’ Thus, by the

time the last component

truck leaves a job site

for a site builder, the

floor trusses are in

place, the walls are in

place, the roof trusses

have been added, and

the home has been completely sheathed, or

weathered in. The

builder at the site then

can take as long as he

wishes to finish the

house at the site using

site subcontractors,

Figure 32

Many Component

Fabricators, such as

this one in Ogden, UT,

have separate buildings

for the production of wall

panels, floor trusses and

roof trusses.
68

Figure 33

The Setting

of modular homes frequently is done by crane.

It is also fairly routine to

set mobile homes by

crane, providing space is

available. By having

these half-house sections completely finished

inside a factory, the ‘cosmetic and stitching up

work’ to be done at the

job site usually can be

handled in less than one

week, and the family can

move in quickly. The

speed saves considerably on construction interest loan costs

because of the much

faster occupancy time at

the site.

Figure 34

This Is Where

the modern U.S. housing

industry got its start. The

invention of the 2x4 or

‘balloon’ framing system

in Chicago in 1833 made

America a nation of

homeowners.

Modular Structures and Related Techniques

—
——

70 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Eric Dluhosch

It is encouraging that the impact of technological change on the building industry is receiving national recognition and Congressional

attention. The question is: Why now, and why

the focus on building technology?

Clearly, there must be a feeling of uncertainty about the future performance of this important sector of the American economy, called

the building construction industry, which according to the Report of the President’s Committee on Urban Housing was expected to

produce enough new homes between 1968 and

1978 to ‘provide a decent home for every American family’ during that decade. The dream of

an affordable decent home seems to be receding, rather than becoming reality. For this reason alone, it is good to meet here and look at

the problems of change and innovation again.

For, in the meantime, we had Operation Breakthrough, the energy crisis, and the effects of

technological change on the steel and automobile industries. If one adds to all this the many

changes in American life styles, and continuing

demographic age and geographic redistribution

of the U.S. population, and the incipient entry

of Japanese and European home manufacturers

in the U.S. market, uneasiness may easily turn

into alarm,

The fact that we are meeting here, and the

fact that the problem has been recognized as

worthy of national attention, brings hope that a

state of alarm can be avoided, and that lessons

have been learned from past mistakes, and that

another ‘crisis’ situation can be avoided.

If there is indeed an uneasiness about the future of the building industry, the first question

to be addressed is whether we are, in fact and

as a matter of perception, dealing with a bonafide manufacturing industry, or whether it may

not be more useful to regard the home-building

industry as a service industry, since it is the

home-building industry which I wish to discuss.

In many respects it is indeed similar to many

other service industries, such as health, education, recreation, and communications, for the

home building industry delivers much more

than just a short-term consumer product. Beyond building houses, it is inextricably involved

in providing a host of other services, from financing to financial security, from status to

ostentation, and from despair to pride. For the

remainder of this discussion, and in order to

provide a better conceptual frame for the following suggestions to be made, I will proceed

on the assumption that home building is indeed

as much of a service than a product, and that it

acts as such in an integrated and highly coordinated manner in providing a host of specialized

services, regardless of the fact that it may be

regarded as highly fragmented as a production

industry. This makes it also possible to neutralize the perennial controversy of fragmentation

vs. integration, and also makes it much easier to

look at technological change as a subservient aspect of service, rather than as the purely technical calculus of production efficiency.

Technological change per se may thus be

viewed as secondary to the achievement of desirable and/or feasible human goals, rather

than as a quasi-autonomous end product. Beyond that, the assessment of change, if related

to service, allows a more inclusive definition of

technology, i.e., the inclusion of ‘soft’ technologies as an equivalent partner to past overemphasis on ‘hard’ technologies.

Thus, if the operations of the home building

sector are viewed as a continuum of multi-faceted but integrated services, it is not only possible, but necessary, to include such ‘soft’

technologies as planning, programming, design,

management, scheduling, procurement, and

general goal setting and decision-making in our

considerations. Institutional constraints can be

legitimately factored in as part of the service

mission of the housing sector, and questions

such as the environmental impact of housing

and quality of various life-style options can be

linked to qualitative as well as quantitative

strategies for the deployment of concrete ‘hard’

technologies (products, materials, systems, and

assemblies). Based on the imperatives of service, technology assessment of hardware avoids

limited definitions of what may or may not be

assigned to a narrowly defined construction sector, thus allowing for the transfer of both techniques and products from the ‘outside.’ The

intention is to break out of existing conceptual

cages, and to broaden the scope of the discus-
Eric Dluhosch 71

sion to include experiences and opportunities offered by all emerging and new technologies,

regardless of their origin, while keeping in mind

the ultimate goal of a quality environment for

all citizens, with least damage to be inflicted on

our already strained natural resources.

Keeping the above in mind, what then are

the major technological changes which have

had an impact on housing? Is there a new and

different way in which we plan, design, procure,

and assemble our houses today that is different

from that of a few decades ago?

I submit that indeed changes in home building techniques and materials have been extensive and significant, even though, on the

surface, the actual appearance of the average

American home has changed very little. There

are two reasons for this: the first is the nature of

the product, the house, as a symbol of social

stability and financial equity; and the second

has to do with its long-term life as an investment asset tied to land and location. Real

change has occurred, however, in the way the

house is being put together, or, to use the

proper technical term, assembled. Here major

changes have affected the selection of substitute

materials, the introduction of mechanized

equipment and hand-held power tools, the delivery to the site of prefabricated components and

assemblies, and the substitution of traditional

fasteners, such as nails, staples, nail-plates,

glues and zippers.

In that sense, the industry has learned its lesson well as an aftermath of the failed expectations of Operation Breakthrough to create a

viable mass market for fully-prefabricated modular units by large quantity producers on large

sites. In general, the trend has been away from

so-called ‘proprietary’ or ‘closed’ systems, towards a more evolutionary (and more orderly)

emphasis on highly-rationalized subsystems,

components, and elements, produced under controlled factory conditions, and supplied at controlled cost and quality.

In addition, the disappearance of large tract

developments in the seventies has forced producers to serve a more diversified market of

scattered sites distributed over larger geographic areas. This has led to more careful considerations of ease of transportation, handling,

and product customization in assembly.

Let me list some of the more dramatic

changes which have occurred along these lines:

Planning and Design

● More compact site planning, with savings

achieved by providing better planned and less

wasteful infrastructure services (i.e., sewers,

water, power, and communications).

• Introduction of new dwelling types for new

life-styles such as cluster housing, zero lot line

zoning, ‘theme’ villages, garden apartments,

condos, and other ‘specialty’ types.

■ Better space utilization by more compact plan

layouts, and the combining of functional

spaces into lofts and galleries, including the

provision of unfinished spaces for future expansion.

• Better understanding of energy saving systems as part of integrated design packages,

using design as a means to minimize energy

consumption. This includes both active and

passive systems, such as solar heating, tromb

walls, insulation sandwiches, atriums, solar

greenhouses, and many more.

All of the above-listed developments have

generated new markets for new products, such

as ‘life-style’ supermarkets for do-it-yourselfers,

TV home-improvement programs, and new

magazines for yuppies and other new life-style

groups. New home owners have become more

sophisticated in their understanding of the way

their homes are constructed, and thus may be

expected to demand better quality and higher

performance from their houses in the future as

well.

In terms of new techniques, the gradual introduction of low- and medium-cost microcomputer systems in the design of housing has led

to the establishment of national as well as local

data bases, readily accessible to professional

and layman alike, thus allowing both access to a

wide range of services, product catalogs, and

other related life-style information.

The linking of computer-aided design programs with compatible software, with the capability of almost instant energy calculations,

cost estimating, inventory checking and design-
72 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

originated production control of automated machines, has made it possible for the first time to

control the entire process by means of fully integrated design-decision programs. Thus, decisions made in the design office can be

electronically linked with inventory and cost

control, procurement, as well as controlling production in the factory, scheduling assembly on

the site, and delivering a customized house, as

per specifications, at a guaranteed cost to the

home buyer. In addition, the increased memory

capacity of the new generation of microcomputers allows for simulated or real-time testing of

alternative designs in terms of cost, production

ease, and customer acceptance. Given this capacity to manipulate and combine, standardization by repetition becomes redundant, since it is

now possible to program the computer to take

cognizance of complex and/or sophisticated

compatibility rules for dimensional and/or positional coordination, without necessarily repeating the end product. This promises more, not

less, design freedom in less time at equal, if not

lower, cost to the end user.

As an extension of the above, it is now technically feasible, both in the US. and to an even

larger extent in Japan, to combine computeraided design directly with the sales office,

where the customer can actively participate in

the design of his or her future home plan and at

the same time get instant feedback on cost and

delivery.

Many of these innovations have been introduced piecemeal and, more often than not, were

developed independently of each other and on a

limited application basis. It is now becoming evident, especially in view of the Japanese example, that a fully-integrated, computer-aided

system which covers all aspects of decision

making from design to erection is not only feasible, but virtually inevitable. This, in turn, will

significantly affect the entire practice of design.

An opportunity will be provided for the designer to again become a true ‘master builder,’

since he or she will be able to assess the consequences of each design decision on every aspect

and phase of the total design-delivery process,

rather than having to depend on time-consuming and indeterminate processes of delegated

control. The impact on design-office organization, professional decision-making roles, and

education is yet to be assessed, but surely will

be dramatic.

Beyond that, the capability of computeraided design-delivery systems to communicate

with each other may be expected to have an

equally dramatic effect on all other aspects of

decision-making in the construction industry,

both in terms of horizontal and vertical communication flow, to wit:

Horizontal:

● Quick access to powerful local as well as national data-bases on a fee-for-service basis

(e.g., Specwriter, AEPIC, etc.)

● Nationally coordinated and periodically updated catalogs of products, assemblies and entire home packages, including performance

and cost data (e.g., a Sears catalog of building)

● Linkage between electronic-specification data

bases, testing, and code administration. For

example, a given design can be matched by

entering its specification ‘profile’ into a codechecking program, to give the designer instant

feedback on code violations or alternative

code-compliance rules

• Electronic control of inventories, linked to

cost and availability

● Customized, as well as automated, production

control

• Robots for productivity and quality control

● Positive cost control and accurate quantity estimates, linked to design

● Testing and comparison of alternative design

solutions against all or some of the above.

Vertical:

• Elimination of ‘back-f-the-envelope’ bidding

• Bidding based on combination of best or least

expensive modular packages, rather than lowest overall estimate

● Direct end-user input into design process, allowing simulated as well as real customization

of plan, linked to instant cost estimate of desired solution

● Time-lapse monitoring of energy consumption

as part of budgeting home-maintenance expenses

• Scheduled operation and maintenance

routines as part of electronic home-control

systems
Eric Dluhosch 73

■ Full-service professional services that are integrated both horizontally and vertically and

are multidisciplinary. Elimination of division

between design and production.

Product/Process

■ Substitution of cheaper and/or better performance products, with better characteristics in

terms of handling, connections, interface and

maintenance ease

• Substitution of hand tools by power tools, and

eventual transfer of most conventional site operations into the factory

● Introduction of computer-controlled machines

in production process. Increased diversification of end product

● Introduction of robots, both in production and

in the home

● Gradual shift from ‘constructing’ a house by

means of semi-processed and extensively sitemodified materials to fully-processed and precoordinated elements, assemblies or entire

modules. Elimination of waste in cutting and

other manipulations on-site.

Some examples of products or processes now on

the market:

Materials:

■ Annular ring- and spiral-shank nails

● Single-layer siding/sheathing

■ Improved paints

● High-pressure, melamine-laminated, countersurfacing materials

● Prefinished siding

● Stress-rated lumber

■ Self-sealing shingles

• Epoxy coatings for plywood

• Polyethylene vapor barriers

■ Rubberized/plastic, single-sheet roof membranes

● Hardboard roofing panels

■ Fiberglass insulation blankets/sheets

• Prefinished large ceiling panels

■ Prefinished tapeless, vinyl-covered, gypsum

drywall

• Resilient tension flooring, applied without adhesives and stapled only at edges

● Solar-film window glass

● Vinyl-extruded window sash.

Assemblies:

■ Split-ring trusses

■ Component wall panels (stapled or glued)

• Wall-hung closets

• Prehung doors and windows

■ Pre-fab stairs

• Wood foundations

● Fiberglass modular bathrooms/showers

■ Raised bathtub assembly with above-floor

trap

• Washerless faucets

■ Single-vent bathroom plumbing

■ Snap-on pipe connections

• Water-saving faucets, toilets, and shower

heads

● Compressed-air-assisted toilet flush

■ New air-to-air heat exchangers

■ Self-diagnosing appliances.

The above list is far from complete, but is offered here as a sample of the rich variety of

new products and assemblies which have entered the market since Operation Breakthrough.

The impact of these innovations on all aspects

of construction practice is both subtle and allpervasive. There is a clear shift from traditional

‘craft’ skills to industrial-type ‘assembly’ skills,

even on-site. In general, no work that can be

handled mechanically (with some rare exceptions, such as brick laying), is done manually.

There is a parallel tendency to reduce the number of joints by larger basic elements, and to

manage jointing operations as much as possible

from the factory. Joints constructed on-site are

more accurate and tighter due to power hand

tools, better joint compounds, joint fillers, and

cover strips, all of which promise easier maintenance (as well as better performance) and mean

less or minimal maintenance. Diaphragm construction permits the use of thinner wood sections and wider spacing of framing members.

The list goes on. As a consequence, homes are

put up much faster and require less labor input

per unit. Quality control has shifted, to a large

extent, from the site to the factory. This has serious implications on inspection and code enforcement. In fact, the whole system of code

administration and enforcement is due for extensive revision and will rely more and more on

computerized data banks and mixed material/

performance specifications.
74 Modular Structures and Related Techniques

Training of construction labor will require a

new approach to specialized skill development,

as well as periodic retraining in mid-career.

Unions will have to cooperate in negotiating

new trade responsibilities, options for trade integration, and a certain degree of skill reorientation on a continuing basis.

Current distinctions between designer, developer, contractor, and producer will become

blurred, with integrated ‘full-service’ organizations — teams providing comprehensive designto-delivery services, possibly including financing

and periodic upgrading options.

As a service sector, construction will rely on

materials from both traditional construction

supply sources, but also from formerly non-construction-oriented industries, such as electronics,

plastics, fabrics, etc.

New specialities, such as geodesic domes,

space-frame structures, inflatables, and fabric/

tension structures are already entering the market as mature industries and are expected to invade the leisure and recreation segment of the

home-building market. Different skills in both

engineering/design and production/assembly

will develop as demand for these ‘exotic’ structures increases.

With the exception of the mobile home, the

trend will be in the direction of ‘open’ or catalog component systems.

Emphasis will be on the development of ‘foolproof’ and easily maintained joints and connections, allowing easy installation and

maintenance-free operation.

Factory production will continue to rely even

more on computer-controlled machines and robets, and will compete with conventional construction for a diversified and customized

market.

Craft skills will become part of a lucrative,

but limited, market for retrofit, conversion, rehabilitation and historical preservation.

Houses will be sold with component warranties by manufacturers and may be financed by

component mix rather than as a finished product.

The development of plug-in, zip-in, and hookup connections for telephone equipment, and

the use of plastics in plumbing, heating, and

electrical equipment will ease maintenance

problems, both in terms of currently outrageous

service fees for even minor repairs, and as an integral part of self-monitoring devices, combined

with home security, climate control and computer-controlled communication centers.

Much of routine maintenance will be performed on a do-it-yourself basis, with the possibility of linking computer-controlled

monitoring systems with pre-recorded or locally

broadcast TV do-it-yourself instructional messages. This will help the home owner to diagnose, as well as correct, minor failures or

communicate for help with warranty service

centers.

Impact on Policy

Historical experience has shown that innovation responds to change, and change to innovation, in most unexpected ways, and that it

usually manifests itself first at the interface of

the frontiers which appear on the horizon of our

expectations. If we fail to search for signs of

change on the horizon of our hopes and expectations, crisis usually forces change and imposes

innovation. Much of our past reaction has been

a response to crises of various origins, rather

than the expansion of our freedom to act. Operation Breakthrough has been mentioned before

and may be seen as a reaction to the housing

‘crisis’ of the sixties. The energy embargo of

1973 precipitated another ‘crisis.’ Few of us

who have devoted years of our professional lives

to the ‘solution’ of these crises have continued

to receive support for continuing our efforts,

even though the ‘crisis’ may have lapsed. Indeed, we are asked to respond to new emergencies, to study new problems, to re-tool for new

research. The tragedy is not that these projects

have failed, for they have not — at least not entirely — but the cost at which their limited success was purchased.

Thus, after having responded every five years

to a new ‘crisis,’ it is my humble opinion that

we do not need or deserve another ‘breakthrough’ or another heroic ‘if we can put a man

on the moon’ effort.

What we need most is genuine continuity and

the removal of unnecessary institutional barriers
Eric Dluhosch 75

and restrictions, which have stunted sustained

efforts to take the long view of things, and

which impede the ability to carry experiments

to their full maturation, including the chance of

failure.

Since innovation by its very nature is impossible to predict — for then it would cease to be

perceived as true innovation — it may be more

useful to remove existing constraints which prevent us from breaking out of present conceptual

cages and to develop a climate of confidence for

long-term institutional as well as private centers

of excellence, which may or may not invent new

gadgets, but which will act as powerful intellectual and technical brain trusts, and whose members will act as a vital source of basic

knowledge and understanding for both government and industry. The former to act as a facilitator, the latter as producer. In concrete terms

this implies:

■

●

●

■

●

m

Agreement on long-term national goals, beyond party or factional concerns;

Assurance of long-term support for so-called

centers of excellence in universities and notfor-profit think tanks;

Removal of institutional barriers, restrictive

rules, and bureaucratic interference with

long-term research and development;

A clear mandate for short-term initiatives and

research, without false promise of long-term

and sustained support, if not expected or

likely to be forthcoming;

Clear allocation of responsibilities and commitments to research and development between government, industry and the

universities;

Monitoring of objective assessment of new

•

●

■

m

■

■

■

●

■

■

technology as to its side effects, and in relation to long-term goals

Removal of conflicting jurisdictional rules between local and national levels of government

Non-adversary partnership between government, industry and universities

Review of all restrictive zoning, based on new

technical and life-style conditions

Operation and maintenance of urban infrastructure systems made independent of discontinuous political mandates. Establishment

of minimum quality standards and technical

performance criteria for capital investment in

the public sector

Short-term policy cycles to be coordinated

with long-range national goals

Appointment of ‘technology watchers’ both

domestically and abroad (based on Japanese

precedent). Regular reporting to Office of

Technology Assessment

Establishment of national data base and information exchange for construction technology advancement and dissemination of

research results and reports by technology

watchers

Establishment of regional construction technology centers, say on the model of Dutch

Bowcentrum, including affiliated continued

training and education programs

Set up bonded warranties for new products

and processes to be introduced in market for

testing purposes

Upgrading of equipment in trade schools and

universities.

Eric Dluhosch is a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Energy In Buildings

David E. Claridge

John P. Millhone

David E. Claridge

Overview of Building Energy

Use and Economic importance

I will begin with a brief overview of the economic importance of energy use in buildings.

This somewhat overlaps John Eberhard’s

presentation but has a different emphasis.

Consider the items that directly affect energy

consumption in a typical commercial office

building. These include the electrical and mechanical systems, lighting, elevators, insulation,

upgraded windows, and measures to reduce air

leakage. The cost of these items will vary from

building to building, but will typically be one

fourth to one third of the cost of the building.

Thus, the construction cost of energy-related aspects of a building is a very significant fraction

of the building cost.

The energy to operate a building typically

costs fifty cents to two dollars per square foot

per year — perhaps ten percent of the total

rental cost. These two items will thus contribute

35 to 40 percent of the total cost of owning and

operating a building.

The cost of energy used in U. S. buildings is

approximately $150 billion per year or about

four percent of GNP This is essentially equivalent to the gross farm income, so we spend as

much for the energy used by buildings as the

income generated by all farming activity in the

United States. Everyone recognizes the importance of the agricultural industry to the country, but the magnitude of energy use in

buildings is not so widely recognized.

I don’t have hard numbers on the building

construction employment due to the energy-related systems and components, but it must exceed one million jobs. I have examined

engineering employment in the energy systems

area, and it appears that about 100,000 engineers work in all facets of the HVAC (heating,

ventilating and air conditioning) field including

equipment design, equipment sales, building

systems design and specification, etc. Energy-related employment in buildings is clearly a significant factor in the national economy.

The importance and overall economic impact

of energy use in buildings depends on how it is

measured, but it is obviously more than one

percent and probably about five percent of

GNP? This is a significant factor in the national

economy.

Energy Retrofit: A Case Study

There are a numerous developments and topics regarding building energy systems that could

be discussed. I will illustrate an important point

with a short case history.

We recently studied energy use and potential

measures to reduce use at the student

recreation center at the University of Colorado.

The University spends about $250,000 per year

on all types of energy for this 150,000 square

foot building. A number of steps had been

taken to reduce energy use in this building subsequent to an earlier study of the building. One

classic measure implemented was rescheduling

the janitors to clean during operating hours instead of at night when the building was closed.

This saved $25,000 per year in lighting cost. A

related measure was delamping to further reduce lighting energy use. Insulation was added

to make the locker rooms below the ice rink

more comfortable, reduce their heating requirements and decrease the refrigeration requirements of the ice rink. A heat recovery system

was added to the brine chillers to preheat hot

water and improve the system efficiency.

These measures resulted in savings of about

$50,000 per year, but this year’s study found a

large number of additional measures which can

save an additional $70,000 per year for an investment of $70,000. Many of these measures

were again very typical.

Outdoor air sensors are used to control baseboard radiation heating in the swimming pool

area. These sensors were 11‘F out of calibration. It is estimated that recalibration at a cost

of $100 will save $5,000 per year in heating

cost.
The usage recorded by a gas meter which

meters clothes dryer consumption exceeded the

rated consumption of the dryers operated 24

hours per day, and they are used less than 8

hours per day.

Interestingly enough, many of the fixtures

that were delamped two or three years ago were

fully lamped this year. The lamping crews had

replaced all of the delamped tubes on their next

pass through the building. The ballasts must be

disabled to ensure that the building will stay

delamped.

Reducing the exhaust air from a number of

the building zones will show immediate benefit,

Many fans continuously exhaust conditioned

air. We also found that a pool cover would save

several thousand dollars a year — and this isn’t

so typical, simply because few buildings have

swimming pools. There were a number of other

similar energy-saving measures identified which

I don’t have time to discuss now.

The major point illustrated is that (with the

exception of the pool cover), every measure recommended by the current energy study was a

change in building operation or an improvement

in the energy-using systems within the building

- not a change in the building envelope or configuration. This is typical of the majority of the

opportunities for reducing energy use in the

commercial building sector.

Recent Trends

Recent trends in new building construction

show a major increase in the number of installations with variable air volume systems. Reheat

systems are not nearly as common as they were

in the past. Variable speed fans and motors are

now being used in some buildings.

There have been numerous equipment improvements in the residential sector. The same

is true in the commercial sector. Improved

compressors and chillers are widely used; heat

recovery from exhaust air is no longer a novelty. This morning we heard about new computer applications in buildings. The level of

control which is possible today is much more sophisticated than was available only a few years

ago. And this will continue to improve.

The use of unconditioned outside air for cooling when temperatures and humidity permit, so

called ‘economizer cooling,’ is an extremely elementary concept; but it was very seldom used

ten years ago. Today it is commonplace. The

use of chilled water storage to permit use of offpeak power for cooling is not yet commonplace,

but it is no longer a novelty.

Cogeneration of heat and electricity was

widely studied and discussed in the late 1970s,

but was seldom used. Recent improvement of

the natural gas supply situation has sparked further interest. Cogeneration is now actively marketed by gas utilities and is increasingly used.

Typical building shell improvements like insulation and better glazing are almost universally used. Further improvements will come in

these areas, especially as high performance

glazing systems are perfected and marketed.

Passive solar and daylighting are sometimes

used in commercial buildings. I should also note

the improvement in electric lighting systems.

Third-party ownership has led to a significant

number of active solar installations on commercial properties.

While these changes have generally resulted

in substantial (and sometimes spectacular) energy savings, they have had a relatively minor

impact on the overall construction process. They

do require a better understanding of building

energy flows and systems by the architects and

engineers who effectively and efficiently design

buildings with low energy use, so the major

change has been the need for improved design

skills.

Future Trends

The last decade’s improvements in building

energy systems, equipment and materials will

continue. Beyond these changes, I believe we

will see increased integration of components and

systems in buildings. The design process will re-
78 Energy In Buildings

quire practitioners with a deeper understanding

of building energy systems and flows and who

know how to integrate HVAC systems and

components with the other systems in efficient

and functional buildings.

An example is inclusion of thermal mass to

reduce energy use. You can seldom afford to

add mass to a building based on reduced energy cost. However, if mass is planned for structural, decorative or other purposes, it makes a

lot of sense to design so the building obtains a

maximum thermal benefit from the mass.

We had a talk this morning about ‘smart’

buildings or ‘intelligent’ buildings. Building control systems will be much more than just energy

system controllers. They will often handle security, life safety systems, communications, etc.

The energy related aspects of these systems will

expand to include control of daylighting, thermal integration, building tightness, indoor air

quality, etc.

I believe that acceptance tests based on the

use of expert systems will eventually become

commonplace. As we all know, after a building

is built, the architect and engineer walk away

and seldom look at it again. We need to go beyond just designing and constructing the building. The design data should be used in

conjunction with an acceptance test to let an

owner know that when a building is accepted,

the energy systems perform as designed. If they

don’t, the building won’t be accepted until the

problems are corrected. We don’t yet know

enough yet about building and systems performance measurement to develop comprehensive

diagnostics immediately, but it will be possible

in a few years.

A related development will be diagnostic testing for existing buildings. Such tests will use a

more limited data base but will still be very

useful for maintenance and will provide valuable information for prospective purchasers.

Rehabilitation and retrofit will be continuous

for functional purposes as well as for energy

purposes. Perhaps one of the best illustrations

of this need is the Enerplex South Building near

Princeton University. The Center for Energy

and Environmental Studies at Princeton assisted

the design team and is now monitoring the

building — designed as a state-of-the-art building. Several cost-effective retrofit measures

have already been identified for this nearly new

building. Variable inlet fans are used in this

building. Today, variable speed fans are viable.

Installing variable speed fans, reducing the

night thermostat setting from 58°F to 55o

F, and

increasing the supply air temperature from

55°F to 60o

F is projected to provide an additional 21 percent reduction in the already low

heating requirements of this building. Note that

none of these items will change the environmental conditions in the building during occupied

hours.

This example illustrates that even state-ofthe-art buildings can sometimes be improved by

system changes. Consequently, I don’t believe

that the existing building stock will be retrofitted and improved to the point where further

retrofits are no longer needed after five years or

twenty-five years.

We can expect increased automation of the

entire design and production process. Increasingly powerful CAD/CAM systems will be

used as discussed this morning and more buildings, assemblies and components will be manufactured.

The changes discussed will lead to improved

building environments and improved building

quality. Both will be increasingly important in

future buildings. Cost-competitive techniques

have been discussed at length and are important. However, note that Japanese automobiles

are not cheaper than American automobiles,

but they offer higher quality; and the American

consumer has learned to appreciate and purchase this quality. This will affect future building purchases as well.

I expect these trends to provide an impetus

for industrialized construction. Energy considerations will not single-handedly bring about industrialized construction, but will encourage

this transition. Tighter buildings with less air

leakage will generally use less energy, and it is

clearly easier to achieve reliably tight construction with industrialized construction techniques.

Finally, I will note an issue of particular interest from a university perspective. These

changes will require a more integrated design

team whose members have better skills and better education than is generally available today.
David E. Claridge 79

This will require changes in university curricula.

As a specific example, we’ve had a lot of recent

input from leading practicing engineers who say

that the education received by HVAC engineers is deficient. The basic and applied thermal sciences education received by the typical

engineer entering the field is less than one semester of his total education. It has been stated

that HVAC engineers take much longer to become productive than structural engineers and

others. This area must be addressed by universities.

Conclusions

Observation of the energy-related changes in

buildings during the last decade and consideration of projected changes indicates that:

● Energy-related changes in buildings will not

require major changes in the structure of the

building industries;

● Technical developments will continue to improve energy efficiency for the foreseeable future. The degree of change will depend on

energy prices;

■ Energy retrofits will continue for decades;

• Consumers will demand improved environmental and construction quality in buildings;

■ Energy-related factors will contribute to the

trend toward industrialized construction; and

• Universities will need to provide better engineering education in the building sciences.

David E. Claridge is an Associate Professor of Civil,

Environmental and Architectural Engineering in the

Building Energy Engineering Program at the University

of Colorado
80 Energy In Buildings

John P. Millhone

I’m going to discuss two topics. First, I’m go

ing to talk about the energy use in buildings,

covering both residential and commercial, to establish sort of a data base for this subject. Then

I’11 talk about residential energy use and what’s

occurring in that area. Dave will talk about

commercial building energy use. We’ve made

this split with the understanding that we occasionally waiver into each other’s area because

our interests are in both areas.

The office I head at DOE handles the regulatory and the research activities of the Department. Usually I find myself tormented by the

regulatory parts of the job. So it’s a great pleasure for me to be able to talk about some of the

researching kinds of things, although we had

gotten into some regulations.

The energy use in the building sector is about

26 quads, 16 of those in the residential area, 10

in the commercial area, and here you can see

how the energy is used for different purposes in

buildings: space heating, water heating, refrigeration dominates in the residential area; space

heating, lighting and air conditioning in the

commercial area. (See Figure 1).

In the residential building sector shown in

Figure 2, here the six percent mobile home

wedge refers to Don Carlson described as

HUD-built, manufactured homes. When we

talk about some of the modular and other manufactured portions of that market, that wedge

would increase.

Figure 3 shows square footage of buildings

rather than energy use in buildings. It indicates

the diversity of different types of buildings,

when we talk about the commercial building

sector.

Now, what this means from a technical perspective is that there are a lot of different kinds

of buildings that you are dealing with in terms

of design materials or what have you when you

talk about commercial buildings.

With that as the introduction, allow me to

make a couple more points as far as energy use

in buildings in the U.S. is concerned. The 26

quads represents about 36 percent of the nation’s energy. The energy use in buildings in the

U.S. has remained fairly stable during the past

ten years in the 26 quad range. However, within

that energy use, there have been some changes

that are fairly interesting. Natural gas use has

changed very little, gone down a small percent.

Petroleum use has declined fairly rapidly, going

from about 18 percent to about 10 percent.

Making up that gap has been a fairly significant increase in electricity energy use in buildings, rising from about 50 percent to 60

percent.

The coupling that I think is starting between

energy, the electricity use in buildings, and the

electricity industry is becoming increasingly significant. As you know, a number of changes are

taking place in the electric industry, and I think

that interaction will be recognized as increasingly important.

As we look forward the gap between energy

supplies and demand is expected to tighten during the last half of the 1980s and remain fairly

tight during the 1990s, creating some upward

pressures on prices. I hate to get into price forecasts, although we do some of that work, but I

think that the pressure on prices will become

more compelling during the latter portion of

this period.

Some forecasts have been made about how

energy will be used in buildings. Space heating

will remain fairly high. Space cooling will become an increasing share, particularly in commercial buildings. Lighting will go down a bit

as we get some more efficient lamps and fixtures and increase use of daylighting. Water

heating will remain fairly stable.

The question that comes out of the energy

use in the buildings portion is: to what extent

will energy costs drive change? I believe that it

will be a moderate-to-major driver during this

period assuming the trends I’ve reveiwed are

not interrupted. The possibility of interruption,

however, means that there’s an element of unpredictability about the extent to which energy

costs will influence construction.

One of the things that should be mentioned

although it’s a fuzzy area, is the extent to which

the embedded costs of existing buildings will be

a significant factor during the next few decades.

Many buildings erected when energy was not a

significant cost factor will be in use for some
John P. Millhone 81

1980 ENERGY CONSUMPTION BY END-USE Figure 1

RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS SECTOR Flgure 2

81 Million Occupied Units in 198 0

- 69% Owner s

- 31% Renter s

\ 6 %

Mobile

Home

EIA 1981 Annual Report to Congress, Volume 3, Supplement 3
82 Energy In Buildings

time. The cost of building new structures will

lend a certain economic and energy appeal to

using existing buildings rather than replacing

them with new ones.

I think that the relationship with electricity

also will become increasingly important.

Now, I’ve completed my remarks about the

energy use in buildings, and I’ll look more specifically at how some of these affect what’s taking place in the residential sector, and stray a

few times into the other areas. I’ve followed the

outline, looking at the new and emerging technologies, the way these technologies may be applied and impacts on the building construction

industries. I will go through the first part of this

fairly quickly and spend most of my time on the

impacts.

If we look at residential or commercial buildings, we really look at three interacting systems:

(1) the building envelope itself; (2) the HVAC

equipment that meets the needs of the people

using the building; (3) the community energy

supply or utility system that supplies energy to

the buildings. The efficiency that comes as the

end result depends upon the relationship and

the interaction among these three systems.

Now, when I talk about the technologies, I

mean first, the building systems and HVAC

equipment and then the community systems.

I think you might look at some of the kinds

of technologies that are currently taking place

as far as building systems are concerned. The

kinds of things such as insulation material becoming significantly higher and possibly changing thermal resistivity. Coating that may be put

on the outside of buildings may be either reflective of the energy coming in or absorbing, depending upon what is desired, and what serves

the energy value of that building most effectively. Some ‘smart’ glazings make it possible to

have two panes of glass with some material between, where electrical current may be passed

through the material, causing it to be reflective

or let light through, depending upon what is

wanted,

I think these are areas in which work is being

done on new technologies that should emerge in

the near future.

We could spend a lot of time on indoor air

quality. I think that area will be important, but

not one I particularly want to discuss at length

at this time.

I think another important area here is the

retrofitting of buildings. It’s harder to identify

what research opportunities there are in the retrofit area. But because of what I think is the

significance of retrofit of buildings, questions of

engineering, optimization and selection will become increasingly important.

Also in the building equipment area, there

are some very promising things going on. Thermally-activated heat pumps that have a COP of

1.7 to 2.0 should be coming into the marketplace in the 1990s. We already have heat-pump

water heaters that are twice as efficient as electric-resistance water heaters. Combustion heating equipment with efficiencies over 90 percent,

and advanced lighting concepts that have improvements from five percent to over 100 percent already exit. These high improvements

normally involve some device for replacing an

incandescent light with a flourescent light, but

those technologies are available.

Integrated appliances are those which may

be made into a single unit by moving thermal

energy one way or another, rather than the separate major appliance units that we currently

have.

Micro processors allow us to be much more

sophisticated in our building control strategy. So

there is a lot of technology there as well.

In the community systems area, I think the

principal technologies of interest are district

heating and cooling. Reducing the cost of district heating and cooling can be accomplished

through lower piping costs, meters that are

more accurate, heat meters, and automated

combusters, five to 25 megawatts, self-contained coal-fired or petroleum-fired combusters.

This has been just a quick mention of some

of the technologies, but it’s representative of a

sort of seething, exciting area of technological

research that includes many, many more things

of the kind we’ve discussed.

The next question is the way these technologies will be applied. One thing I think we already know, and have demonstrated fairly well,

is that we now can build residential buildings

that are extremely energy efficient in terms of
John P. Millhone 83

reducing heating requirements in cold climates.

That was one of the first targets at which we

aimed. Single-family residences that have an energy requirement of something like one or two

BTUs per square foot per degree day can be,

and have been, built. These residences have a

heating bill of a couple hundred dollars. We

know how to do this. Less time has been spent

attempting to make buildings energy efficient in

hot climates where cooling is the principal concern, but we’re talking about engineering applications not significantly different from those

that we have used successfully in the cold- climate areas. Therefore, I think that with the

application of research in this area we’ll be able

to solve that problem as well.

1 think the significant point in many of these

areas is that it’s not really the absence of technological capability that is going to slow

progress. 1 believe it’s going to be more a problem of ‘know-how.’ Getting information about

how to use the available technologies throughout the infrastructure, and also some economic

constraints, may be a hindrance, but not a lack

of technology.

There will be an increase in attention given

to how these technologies can be applied to existing residences. The quality of construction

will also be given more attention. So far a large

part of the research in the residential and commercial building areas has been spent looking at

how component parts of buildings work. Increasingly important, now and in the future, will

be to determine the interaction of these components and how to put all of the parts together so

the entire building operates efficiently.

Similar kinds of changes can occur in the

building equipment area. The increased ‘envelope’ performance of newly-built residences will

call for smaller-sized HVAC equipment. The

most cost-effective retrofits in existing residences will often be done in the equipment area

rather than ‘envelope’ retrofits.

As a result of the coupling of utility policy

with building policy, more attention will be

given to utility load management. Micro-processors can be used to monitor how building equipment operates in terms of its demand for

electricity. Such systems will enable utilities to

better match load factors with demand rates.

COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS SECTOR

44.6 Billion Square Feet in 197 9

Sales

Figure 3

EIA Nonresidential Building Energy Consumption Survey: Lodging 3.8%

Building Characteristics 1981 4.5%
84 Energy In Buildings

As a result of the technologies and other

things that I’ve mentioned, there'll be more district heating and cooling systems initiated. Not

the large central systems that we’ve seen, but

more neighborhood-sized community systems.

With regard to the impacts of technology on

the building construction industries, Don

Carlson’s paper contains some thought-provoking points. As a result of reading his paper, I’m

not as confident about some of the things I said

here as I was before. Nevertheless, I will goon

in an attempt to continue to stimulate some

more of the lively discussion that we have had.

Continued and increased attention to energy

performance in new residences, along with

many other factors, will contribute to pushing

up the costs of conventional, single-family residences. Concern for affordability will continue

and grow. The shift to multi-family dwellings

compared to single-family dwellings will continue, and a shift to smaller residences will occur. Some residences we’re seeing now are

really very small in size. There are condominium units of as little as 240 square feet, which

is about one-sixth of what is generally considered to be the usual size.

There will be great concern for the quality of

construction because of the recognition of its

significance to energy performance. Tighter

houses will cause increased attention to indoor

air quality and other safety issues, adding potential cost for improvements. The move to

manufactured, modular and prebuilt housing

will continue at a moderate rate.

I come from rural Iowa, and despite the predictions of his elimination that have gone on

since the turn of the century, the family farmer

still hangs on there pretty tightly. I think that

the home builder is much the same breed, and

there will be many home builders around long

after the forecasts of their demise have run

their course.

There will be some increased labor shifts.

This is a controversial question, and maybe we

can target it. At several points here, I have

talked about the impact of technology on labor

and tried to predict where the impact might

least affect skilled or moderately skilled labor,

It seems tome that it’s at least arguable that

manufactured housing will lead to some reduction in the skill level required for workers.

Home builders will continue to expand into

the multi-family and small commercial area.

The retrofit activity will increase and provide

jobs to some of those unable to find employment in new construction. The retrofit field will

become more sophisticated, however, involving

computer simulation of various retrofit technologies.

The heating, cooling and appliance manufacturing industries will remain active, although

their product lines will change. However, if

these industries fail to make the product improvements that may be called for, they will

leave the door open for increased foreign competition.

The interaction between building energy conservation activities and the utilities’ planning

policy will become more apparent. This will

lead to increased planning and management activities in terms of that interaction.

Investment in district heating and cooling

systems will create construction jobs in urban

areas. This is another area where I think medium and mid-level skills could be employed.

These systems could be included very effectively when considering investments for renovating the urban infrastructure.

John F? Millhone is Director of the Office of Building

Energy Research and Development at the United States

Department of Energy
6

Construction

Technologies

Richard L. Tucker

Richard L. Tucker

I’m not sure I agree with some statements

made in previous papers. Rather than disagree

with them, I'll just discuss the fact that there is

a concerted interest and concern, particularly

among the private community in this country,

over the cost of construction itself. This is probably evidenced most closely by the Business

Roundtable. The Business Roundtable is now

right in the middle of Phase Three of a rather

massive effort to look at the whole issue of

growing costs in construction projects.

As you know, the Business Roundtable is

made up of chief executive officers of the nation’s largest corporations. They’ve put several

million dollars of direct funding into this program, just trying to get a handle on the cost of

construction and on what can be done to improve it. I would encourage you to write to

them and get a copy of their reports. They have

23 separate reports that have been published.

The reports are free, including a summary report entitled “More Construction for the

Money.”

They’re now into Phase Three with an effort

to try to educate the nation about all of the different factors relating to construction costs and

about what should be done to improve these

factors.

I have a different classification of construction than what John Eberhard presented, My

classification results from a purely technological

perspective. My four major categories include:

residential buildings; non-residential buildings;

engineered construction; and industrial construction. I would claim to you that these four

categories are very distinct in terms of the types

of workers that are involved in them, in terms

of the types of construction companies, and in

terms of the types of designers that participate

in the projects.

Residential construction is dominated principally by architects, if there are any professionals at all. There are many house designers

in the world that don’t have any type of degree.

The people that work in residential construction

are relatively unskilled, compared to those that

work in the other types of construction.

MR. EBERHARD: Did you say residential

is dominated by architects?

MR. TUCKER: I say if there are any professionals, it’s dominated by architects. It’s really

dominated by the people that push and develop

them as far as the technical aspects of it are

concerned.

Now, I’m not talking about the land development, John, I’m talking from the standpoint of

the structural design, the components that go

into it. All of this is a technical classification

rather than a marketing classification.

Non-residental buildings are certainly dominated by architects. The engineering component

in buildings is relatively small compared to the

architectural component.

The engineered construction probably should

be classified as civil engineered construction.

That is, it is dominated by the civil engineering

community: highways, dams, bridges, those

kinds of things.

Industrial construction is dominated by other

types of engineers: chemical, mechanical and

electrical engineers. These projects include

power plants, process plants, and other similar

areas.

The size of the industry is one of the problems that we have. We don’t know how to measure the size. Figure 1 came out of the Business

Roundtable study in which they tried to compare the Census Bureau’s numbers and their

own estimates. On the left, it shows the total industry in the United States comprised $229 billion for 1979. The Business Roundtable went

back and took data that they had from their

own companies and showed some rather major

changes in it and put the size at a round number of $300 billion a year.

This also shows, if you believe these numbers

on the right, the relative magnitude of the different components of the industry, and it shows

perhaps a different set of numbers than what

John gave us yesterday in his presentation. Any

way you look at it, the industry is very large

and the opportunities for change are significant.
Similar data from the Roundtable show the

construction cost index and that it is, at best,

subject to dispute. It’s part of the problem we

have; we can’t measure anything we agree on.

Nonetheless, the construction cost index, as you

look at numbers from back at 1967, shows that

over the past fifteen years or so construction

costs have gone up approximately 50 percent

more than the rate of inflation as a whole for

the nation.

The productivity index is just as controversial. I could show a variety of statistics. They all

show the same kinds of trends, and that is that

over the past fifteen or twenty years or so, construction productivity has dropped, again about

50 percent, compared to the rest of the econom y.

Now, the Roundtable is very concerned

about this. In contrast to some of the things

that we were discussing yesterday, what these

companies are saying is they’re only going to

put a certain amount of money into construction, and unless the productivity goes up,

they’re not going to build as much. Indeed, the

nation’s larger companies have quit building as

much as they have. It’s a crisis as far as they’re

concerned.

One of the unique characteristics of construction is that it’s very heavily dependent upon job

site labor, and productivity almost translates to

the productivity of the craftman’s time. You’re

not going to find the numbers in Figure 2 in the

literature because I made them up,

(Laughter.)

MR. TUCKER: But I made them up with a

certain amount of background, and you can

find a lot of numbers in the literature that are

compatible with these. I’ve shown these figures

all over the world and to many of the companies in the United States, and what they tell me

is that if anything the top number, showing 40

percent productive labor time, is a little bit

high, and they feel that perhaps it realistically

should be lower than that.

That doesn’t mean that craftsmen aren’t busy

more than 40 percent of the time. It means that

their time is not necessarily spent productively.

TYPICAL CONSTRUCTION WORKER TIME Figure 1

PRODUCTIVE 40%

UNPRODUCTIVE

Personal 5%

Jurisdictiona l 15%

Poor Methods 20%

Administrative Delays 20%

Figure 2

$ 1495

9 4 6

I 546

2 9 9

11 59

26.47

990 3

490 0

$69 0

14 .2

232

4 5

146

2 6 5

9 9 0

4 9 0

TOTAL NEW CONSTRUCTION $22895 $3000
88 Construction Technologies

However, we have a lot of work sampling studies and other data that show — I guess the particular extreme is the nuclear power plants —

that 30 percent is about all of the time that

they’re busy at all on some projects.

If you look at the sources of the other 60 percent of craftsman time, then some of it perhaps

is personal. I put five percent down there. Some

people might claim that it’s higher. Ten percent

is about as high as you can find anyone that

would realistically claim that it is on the average.

Jurisdictional problems may be due to

unions, but not necessarily so. Even the merit

shop companies have a kind of artificial jurisdiction that they’ve established where one craft

does one thing and one craft another thing.

Carpenters don’t put in conduit, for example,

even though they’re quite capable of putting in

conduit. There are lots of jurisdictional problems. Operators can’t unload the truck, It takes

a particular craft that has the stuff on the truck

to unload their stuff. Perhaps that’s some wastage of time.

Perhaps the ones that we should focus on are

mostly the bottom two, the poor methods and

the administrative delays. The methods themselves are the things that relate specifically to

technology and the technology of putting the

work into place, that of physically making the

attachments.

Administrative delays relate pretty closely to

the computer issues that Harry was talking

about yesterday. These projects have many parties participating in them, and the communications are very tough. I could show you some

other figures that would show you magnitude,

but I won’t because of time.

If we want to see the opportunities for improvement from a technological standpoint,

then we probably should look at the different

areas of a project as they take place. These are

shown in Figure 3, as well as indicators of inefficiency.

Then if you look at the sources of inefficiency, and the things that might be indicators

of inefficiency, how difficult is it to estimate

costs for an area, how sensitive is that area to

design, what’s the lead time for schedule in the

area, how much rework takes place, and so

forth, then you can begin to get some kind of a

feel for it. The numbers in Figures 4-7 represent

the opportunities for technological improvement. The manner in which we developed quantitative numbers was to survey rather

knowledgeable people in some of the nation’s

largest companies and ask them to rate these on

a scale of one to ten. The number one meant

that it was very easy to do something, a ten

meant that there was a lot of difficulty and had

a lot of inefficiency associated with it.

Then we took those average ratings and multiplied them by the percentage costs of a total

project and broke them into four sectors. The

power sector is one, and if you look at that sector (Figure 7), then it’s obvious that the length

of the bar, which is a combination of the relative cost impact and the difficulty on a project,

it falls into the piping and mechanical equip

ment installation and electrical category.

Heavy industrial projects (Figure 6), such as

process plants and steel mills, show the same

major areas: piping, mechanical equipment, installation, electrical. Piping shows up much

more dominantly. As a matter of fact, piping is

not only the largest portion of those projects,

but also the most inefficient element of those

projects, and so the length of that bar is rather

obvious.

Now, remember this is a $60 billion per year

industry. So it’s not something to sneeze at. It is

comparable to the size of the housing industry.

Light industrial plants are more building oriented, and as a result, the things that relate to

buildings and some other things begin to become prominent. The structure, for example,

begins to be a prominent area in light industrial

buildings.

Then the structure, the enclosure skin and

the interior finishes, are all very prominent, and

as you can see, electrical is relatively more important in buildings than you would think. From

the presentations we heard yesterday, electrical

is going to be increasingly important in buildings.

Well, these are where we should probably be

putting our attention. If you look at the areas of

highest technology potential, then in buildings it

falls into the structure, enclosure skin, interior

finishes and electrical; in the other sectors, into

these other three areas.
Richard L. Tucker

Even in buildings, I might advise you that

plumbing, piping, those things are not insignificant. They’re areas that justify attention.

If you look at an industry-wide basis and try

to focus on the areas that have the greatest potential for this $300 billion a year industry,

strictly from a technological improvement

opportunity, then the piping, mechanical equipment, installation, electrical are the highest areas of potential. This is a weighted scale. The

high areas of potential involve the structure and

setting of vessels in the HVAC systems, installing special equipment and instrumentation, and

are not incompatible with the things that we

heard yesterday.

Some areas have lower potential, We complain a lot about roofing in buildings, and it certainly has an impact from a long-range

operation standpoint. It has very little impact

from the standpoint of efficiency of installing

the project itself. The same thing is true with

insulation and painting. Those are relatively

a

b

c

c!

e

f

9

h,

i

J

k

I

m

n

o

DIFFICULTY IN ESTIMATING COSTS

SENSITIVITY TO TIMELINESS & QUALITY

OF DESIGN

NECESSARY LEAD TIME FOR SCHEDULING

PROBLEMS IN OBTAINING PROPER

MATERIALS (CONSTRUCTION EFFORT—

NOT DESIGN)

UNPLANNED REWORK ON YOUR TYPICAL

PROJECTS

WHICH REQUIRES THE MOST

COMMUNICATlONS BETWEEN ENGINEERING

& CONSTRUCTION TEAMS

PROBLEMS IN MATERIALS HANDLING &

DISTRIBUTION

SENSITIVITY TO PREFABRICATION

TOLERANCES AND ACCURACY

NUMBER OF DIFFERENT CRAFTS REQuIRED

DEPENDENCE ON FOREMEN COMPETENCE

CRAFTSMAN SKILL NEEDED TO PERFORM

OPERATION

REQUIRED SPECIALIZED TOOLS &

EQUIPMENT FOR CONSTRUCTION

NECESSARY COORDINATION WITH

SUPPORT CRAFTS (SCAFFOLDING. WELDING

TESTING, ETC )

MOST WASTED TIME AMONG CRAFTSMEN

WASTED TIME WAITING FOR INSPECTIONS

I CIVIL MECHANICAL OTHERS

89

Figure 3
90 Construction Technologies

small portions of projects, and they’re relatively

efficient compared to the other aspects of the

projects.

We went through some number systems and

tried to take just those three areas of highest

potential and estimate the savings on a nationwide basis per year, if you could just make

those three areas no more inefficient than the

average of the rest as a whole. So this isn’t the

potential that we could improve those, but just

bringing them down to the same level of inefficiency as everything else, and as you can see in

Figure 8, the potential savings are significant.

If you’re wondering what the average cost of

these projects is, this is based on a $25 million

building because that was what was reported by

the companies, and it shows an average savings

of $91,000, even though those three areas aren’t

the highest potentials for buildings.

Incidentally, the structure is only an area of

potential because of its relative magnitude in

the project. It’s a relatively efficient area of a

project compared to the other areas of a building project.

I think the average cost of light industrial

projects was about $120 million, and the heavy

industrial, about $200 million, and power

plants, about $500 million. On a nationwide basis for the gross industry then, the figures show

that we could save about two billion dollars a

year by just improving those three areas, not to

say the other areas that are of higher potential

in buildings.

Then you can go back and look at the activities that go into each of these areas. We picked

six of these areas: electrical, instrumentation,

piping, equipment installation, and then we

broke the structure into two areas because concrete and steel construction have distinctly different characteristics.

We’ve investigated them pretty carefully.

(Figures 9-14). We took the activities involved

in steel construction, for example, setting the

columns, setting the beams, making the connections as shown in Figure 14. The temporary

connections and the final connections, putting in

shims and cleaning the anchor bolts seem to be

the major things in steel construction. We determined how much time each of these takes. Setting the column takes about 35 percent of the

time in the cycle; setting the beams, 25 percent;

final connections, 20 percent; temporary connections, 15 percent. I wouldn’t claim to want

to bet a lot of money on the accuracy of these

numbers, but they’re as good as I’ve seen.

Then we asked the people in the field, the superintendents in charge of these operations, to

rate each of these areas on the basis of how

complicated it is, the complexity of that particular activity, how much skill, the level of

skill required for that activity, and then the dependence on accurate technical information for

that activity because of this interface between

design and construction that takes place, and

that’s what the ratings here indicate.

Invariably, what we find is that the ones that

take the most time are also the ones that rate

highest on all three of these areas. So it’s possible to determine which kinds of activities tend

to lend themselves to this inefficiency. It is

somewhat subjective, but about as quantitative

as we can make it at this stage.

Figure 13 is for concrete; constructing the

form, setting the reinforcement, locating the

forms, placing the concrete, aligning the forms,

removing the forms after you’ve got the concrete placed, and so forth.

From this we focused on six activities and examined technological improvements that would

lend themselves to major changes.

What we find in concrete work is that the designers, the structural engineers, architects, and

so forth, tend to design the concrete structure

as it’s going to be in the final building. They

don’t tend to put much detail in design on how

it gets in place. They will show where the reinforcement is located. They don’t say anything

about imbeds. Architects love to put a lot of imbeds in places for electrical boxes and those

sorts of things, and those just play havoc with

the construction crews because those imbeds

somehow are supposed to be there when it’s finished, but they’re not designed on how they’re

attached to the forms while you place the concrete in them. When you put some kind of electrical box into the concrete form, and you

depend on the workers in the field to somehow

hold it in exact position while you place the concrete around it and push it around, it causes a

lot of difficulties.
Richard L. Tucker 91

The lack of communication between designers and the people physically constructing these

things causes lots of problems. Well, in the cost

of concrete structures, the cost of the concrete

form work itself is roughly equivalent to the

cost of the concrete, the cost of the concrete

and the steel. The cost of just the form work is

roughly half the total cost, and it’s the most volatile thing. If you talk to a construction company, they’ll always tell you that they could

care less about how much concrete it takes because they can figure that up pretty good, but

they put all of their attention on figuring out

how to design the form work and how to reuse

the forms.

If you look at all of the other elements of

construction, whether it’s electrical, instrumentation, equipment setting or anything else, you’ll

find that the common thing is making connections; that is the common problem that wastes

EARTHWORK. . . . . . . . .

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . .

STRUCTURE . . . . . . . . .

ENCLOSURE SKIN . . . . . .

INTERIOR FlNISHES . . . . .

ROOFING. . . . . . . . . .

PIPING . . . . . . . . . . .

PLUMBING . . . . . . . . .

VESSELS. . . . . . . . . . .

HVAC. . . . . . . . . . . .

MECHANICAL EQUIPMENT . .

SPECIAL EQUIP INSTALL . . .

ELECTRICAL . . . . . . . . .

INSTRUMENTATION . . . . .

INSULATION . . . . . . . .

COATINGS AND PAINTING .

FIRE PROOFING/PROTECTlON.

BUILDINGS

all of the time in the construction industry:

making any kind of connection, whether it’s a

beam to a column, a beam to a beam, electrical

wire that you’re putting terminations in, whatever. The connections are the things that have

the very high level of inefficiency. We haven’t

yet learned how to do that with robotics or any

other kinds of machines. It still takes people

and is a very inefficient operation, a lot of

standing around all the time they’re doing it.

Now, I want to talk about the breakdown between design and construction. I spent a lot of

time studying a large precast erection project a

few years ago in Houston. It had about 2,500

beams and columns and double-Ts that had to

be put in place. We were studying the efficiency of the erection operation rather carefully. The vertical scale on Figure 15 is the

number of pieces that were erected each day.

The horizontal scale is time. As you can see, the

7

—

I

Figure 4
92 Construction Technologies

pieces/day varies all over the place. The factors

that cost time are fit-up problems.

Figure 16 illustrates that if you put a double-T on a ledger beam that you have some tolerance. One inch is typical. We took several

structures and compared them. The one-inch

tolerance that these were designed for resulted

in a five-inch bearing area plus or minus a half

inch. You can see the range shown in about

seven thousand measurements. What this says is

that we need to integrate the design, definition,

construction sequence much more and have a

lot more interaction between the designers and

the others. This is the potential impact of that

integration. I’ve also put this on the handout.

In terms of combined impact of all of these

things, I suggest to you that we’re going to see

some rather major changes. I’m claiming that

Figure 5

EARTHWORK. . . . . . . . .

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . .

STRUCTURE . . . . . . . . .

ENCLOSURE SKIN . . . . . .

INTERIOR FINISHES . . . . .

ROOFING. . . . . . . . . .

PIPING . . . . . . . . . . .

PLUMBING . . . . ● . . . .

VESSELS. . . . . . . . . ,

HVAC. . . . . . . . . . . .

MECHANICAL EQUIPMENT . .

SPECIAL EQUIP INSTALL . . .

ELECTRICAL . . . . . . . . .

INSTRUMENTATION . . . . .

INSULATI0N . . . . . . . .

COATINGS AND PAINTING .

FIREPROOFlNG/PROTECTION.

LIGHT INDUSTRIAL

43

technological changes are going to be made in

the construction aspect of the industry, regardless of whether there’s a Government program

or not. The climate is here, We’re going to have

to have more integration of the design and construction. We’re even going to get the owners

into these things. We’re going to find more machine-driven construction processes instead of

people-driven construction processes, and we’re

going to find some major revisions in contract

strategies. Instead of completing a design and

putting the thing out for competitive bids, we’re

going to have to get the contractors in on it at

an earlier stage. We’ll have to have contracts

that will speak to that point.

Richard L, Tucker is Director of the Construction industry Institute at the College of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

10

.—
Richard L. Tucker 93

EARTHWORK. . . . . . . , ,

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . .

STRUCTURE . . . . . . . . .

ENCLOSURE SKIN . . . . . .

INTERIOR FINISHES . . . . .

ROOFING. . . . . . . . . .

PIPING . . . . . . . . . . .

PLUMBING . . . . . . . . .

VESSELS. . . . . . . . . . .

HVAC. . . . . . . . . . . .

MECHANICAL EQUIPMENT . .

SPECIAL EQUIP INSTALL . . .

ELECTRICAL . . . . . . . . .

INSTRUMENTATION . . . . .

INSULATION . . . . . . . .

COATINGS AND PAINTING .

FIREPROOFING\PROTECTION .

HEAVY INDUSTRIA L

Figure 6

)
94 Construction Technologies

Figure 7

EARTHWORK. . . . . . . . .

FOUNDATIONS . . . . . . .

STRUCTURE . . . . . . . . .

ENCLOSURE SKIN . . . . . .

INTERIOR FINISHES . . . . .

ROOFING. . . . . . . . . .

PIPING . . . . . . . . . . .

PLUMBING . . . . . . . . .

VESSELS. . . . . . . . . . .

HVAC. . . . . . . . . . . .

MECHANICAL EQUIPMENT . .

SPECIAL EQUIP INSTALL . . .

ELECTRICAL . . . . . . . . .

INSTRUMENTATION . . . . .

INSULATION . . . . . . . .

COATINGS AND PAINTING .

FIREPROOFlNG/PROTECTION .

POWER
Richard L. Tucker 95

Individual Project Basis ($ millions)

Buildings (25 million)

Light Industrial ($120 million)

Heavy Industrial ($190 million)

Power ($470 million)

.006 .039 .046 $ .091 million

.241 .174 .258 $ 0.673 millio n

3.802 1.002 1.410 $ 6.214 million

5.060 3.046 2.744 $10.850 million

Gross Industr y Basis ($ billions )

Buildings ($69 billion ) .017 .108 .128 $ .253 billio n

Light Industrial ($33 billion) .067 .048 .071 $ .186 billion

Heavy Industrial ($33 billion) .667 .176 .247 $ 1.090 billion

Power ($27 billion) — .

.292 .176 .158 $ — .626 billion

Total ($162 billion) 1.043 .508 .604 $ 2.155 billion

*Assumptions

Figure 8

1 . Labor component is 25% of a project.

2. Improvement would allow Piping, Mechanical Equipment and Electrical

to achieve average indicator ratings.

3 . Numbers in parentheses are total project costs.
96 Construction Technologies

Figure 9

1.0 -

2.0 -

3.0 -

4.0 -

5.0 -

6.0 -

I

4

i
Richard L. Tucker

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

7.0

Complexity

Skill require d

Dependence on Technical Information

97

Figure 10
98 Construction Technologies

Figure 11

1.0

2 . 0

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

Complexity

0 --0- - Skill Required

● . ● ● . . . . . . . . . . Dependence on Technical Information
Richard L. Tucker 99

1.0 -

2.0 .

3.0 -

4.0 .

5.0 .

6.0 .

c

o

Complexity

Skill Required

Dependence on Technical Information

Figure 12
100 Construction Technologies

Figure 13 1.0 -

2.0 -

3.0 -

4.0 -

5.0 .

6.0 -

7.0 -

8.0 -

9.0 .

10.0 .

I

+

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.

●

●

.

●

● .0

●

● .“

●

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●

● ●*

Complexity

Skill Required

● * ● . . . . . . . . . . . Dependence on Technical Information
Richard L. Tucker 101

1 . 0

2 . 0

3 . 0

4 . 0

5 . 0

6 . 0

● ✎✌☛

●✎●

●

●

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✼

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Complexity

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Figure 14
102 Construction Technologies

Figure 15

4 0

0

3 0

0

6 0

I

9 0 120

WORKING DAYS
Richard L. Tucker 103

.

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Figure 16
Structural Systems

Wendel R. Wendel

I’m going to talk about what we’ve been doing at Space Structures in the hardware area as

well as the software area.

By hardware I mean the physical nuts and

bolts, and by software I mean the computeraided techniques that we build at Space Structures.

Secondarily, I want to talk about the development of a new organizational position of

Space Structures in the industry as a systems

specialist. I want to cover eight concepts.

One is the standardization of design/fabrication process. We want to get away from the

idea that you’re going to standardize a component and you’re going to mass produce those

widgets and send them out the door, and that’s

going to save building technology. That’s a mistaken idea. It will always be wrong, It will

never apply. The idea is that you standardize

the process of how something’s built.

Secondly, I want to talk about new forms

and shapes. We basically have a box mentality.

All of the buildings we are sitting in right now

are box shape. There are a lot of other forms

and shapes which may be much more appropriate in many different applications. We really

are just beginning to touch upon those possibilities.

Third, 1 want to talk about the use of lightweight building materials. Our specialty is

working with aluminum, working with membrane materials, working in plastics and glass,

Light weight materials open up the marketplace. Space Structures is based in New York

but we have offices throughout the world.

We’re not just a New York firm or a regional

firm, but a world firm.

1 want to talk about the three Rs of buildings. I’ve almost never or rarely talked about

this, but we have a bunch of people out there

designing buildings which are basically monuments. We really should start looking about the

three basic Rs, which means relocatability,

readaptability, recyclability of the building.

The fifth one we want to talk about is the

restructuring of the labor which goes into building with new building technology. In our own

experience, we find 90 percent of the work done

is in the shop, only ten percent in the field. We

never build anything in the field. We only assemble it in the field. We fabricate in our

plants.

I also want to talk about the new market out

there which extends the building technology. I

know we are having our guest here from

NASA talking about NASA technology coming

back to the building industry. I actually think

we can get more than the technology from

NASA, and I want to talk about what our programs have been in those areas. The marketplace is not just terrestrial. You’ve got to think

on a global, galactic scale. Eventually, we want

to change the name of the corporation from

Space Structures International Corporation.

Our plans are once we get something in space,

we want to change it to Space Structures intergalactic Corporation.

We also want to talk about quality, quality in

the sense that buildings should be structural art.

We somehow get the idea that we’re finding

cheaper and cheaper ways to put up buildings,

and that’s really what the needs are. But that is

not the real cost of buildings. We could really

build most buildings as pup tents, and basically

protect ourselves from the environment, from

the rain, the weather conditions and things like

that. A lot of the cost of buildings is it’s social

status indicator, the costs which go into a building, and if we’re doing that, we should at least

spend the money in the planning to create better looking buildings.

Most buildings I find are really trashy, industrial designs. I think there’s a lot more which

can be done, especially if we use technology in

those areas, and I think we can be much more

creative.

And the last item is the development of the

new teams. As a systems specialist in the industry, I see the industry greatly changing. I’ve

found in my thirteen years in building my company we’ve seen a change in that amount of

time. We’ll talk at the end about where those
changes come about and how the new teams

are being put together.

As I said, Space Structures’ philosophy is

‘where visions take shape,’ and we’re going to

talk about space networks, new forms, new

shapes and new systems, and we’ll talk about

the second generation of space frames. In the

products that we do, we do space frames which

we call Octa Hubs and Orba Hubs, two different systems, and the new designs tool is called

SSCAD, Space Structures Computer Aided

Design.

Back in 1980, I invented two new space

frame systems. The red one in my hand (see

Figure 1) is called Octa Hub. The one in my

left hand, the golden, brass colored one is called

the Orba Hub system. They were invented

about six weeks apart from each other. Both are

patented systems, and basically it’s the result of

about ten years of work in doing different types

of structures, mainly specializing in domes.

We decided to get into the space frame area

after I had sold two contracts, one for a big

atrium and skylight on the Hyatt Hotel in Crystal City, Va. and one for three sports enclosures

for Aramco.

Figures 2 and 3 show the Octa Hub system,

which 1 invented in 1980. Our basic material is

aluminum here. It’s an extrusion bolted together with square tubing where the tubing can

take various wall thicknesses. We’re using pins

rather than bolts to put it together to reduce

down the amount of on-site installation time.

With an Octa Hub system, we typically might

be doing a million dollar job and charging only

$50,000 for the installation.

Figures 4 and 5 show details of the Orba

Hub system. It is a solid aluminum ball. Tapered ends, struts, and multiple types of finishes can be put on the system.

A space frame can be a very simple structure. Figure 6 shows a flat structure that most

people expect when they think of space frames.

Here in the United States we expect space

frames to be little atriums or canopies. But

space frames can take many forms. Figure 7

shows the Federal Express Pavilian at the

Figure 1
106 Structural Systems

Figure 2

Figure 3

World’s Fair down in Knoxville I did for Federal Express back in 1982. It’s a multiplate

type of design. The whole building is a space

frame, as is the laser tower.

I now want to talk about SSCAD, which is

one of the main tools and the assets of space

structures. We started writing our own program

back in 1973. At that time we were buying

computer time from Boeing and McDonnell

Douglas. About three and a half years ago, we

bought our first computer, and we started further development of SSCAD to give us a total

knowledge system.

One of the things we’ve seen in some of the

talks yesterday about design, we’ve almost

talked about computer systems basically replacing the pencil. Well, at Space Structures, the

computer systems replaced the pencils and

eventually we go up and we’ll take everybody’s

pencil away from them. We’re going to gold

plate it, put it up on the wall and say, “The last

day a pencil was ever used at Space Structures.” We want to eventually get there.

But what we want to say is also the computer

systems can extend the design process. The idea

of computers replacing what’s being drafted

right now is fine, but that’s not the real impact.

The real impact is when we change the design

process, change the possibilities, change the potential.

SSCAD is a computer system designed in

about ten main sections. Each amount of the

pie on Figure 8 indicates about its magnitude.

We use the system from the proposal stages

through design, through loading, which means

loading up the structure for analysis, and we

run our analysis, our finite element anaylsis, on

it. We use it for post-analysis processing. We

generate all drawings from it. It’s used in planning out the fabrication, material management.

It’s used to plan out the installation of the rigging, which is used to lift the structure, and it’s

used to store historical data.

We found that while virtually all the computer hardware we wanted was available, software was basically not applicable. We spent

almost three times that amount in our own inhouse software development over the years as

we have on hardware. You have to plan on

those types of expenditures if the system is
Wendel R. Wendel 107

really going to work. You have to look at having

an integrated system which can grow with the

corporation.

Our basic system uses a Hewlett Packard

9000 series 32 bit processor, and we have a

shared resource management system. This is

the fastest equipment available right now, and

it’s probably the right direction rather than our

main frame direction. We look at going both directions. The shared resource management appreach gives us capability of having almost

unlimited units connecting the others, sharing

the resources through a mainline data-storage

area, and we can hook up to our system. Right

now we’re running five separate units on it, plus

one up in Cambridge. We can run 140 or 150

units with no problems.

SSCAD is menu-drive type program. Figures

9 and 10 show two sections of menu-driven system. We can teach people how to use the system in one day. We often have architects and

engineers coming for one-day sessions at Space

Structures to design their projects. Within an

hour’s time they can be using the system. It is

truly user friendly. In most of the computer systems you’re keypunching in numerical information. You really want to be putting in graphical

information. You want much more sophisticated programs. That is where we have spent

our money.

Figure 9 shows how the menu basically has

soft keys on it. You hit, let’s say, number one,

preprocessing menu. You bring it up (Figure

10), and you say you want to generate a space

frame geometry. So you hit another one again,

and you can get it to generate all different types

of forms and shapes. In space frames, you can

do horizontal, vertical, sloped, towers, trusses,

multi-layers, pyramids, multiple plates, steps,

conical domes, cylindrical, anything the mind

can imagine. The idea of a space frame as being a little horizontal form is very much limited

in network thinking. Network thinking gives

you the capability of looking at a lot more different forms, and you get efficiency out of

form.

Figure 11 shows a design for a hanger for a

747, a large, curved form. For this aircraft, you

Figure 4

Figure 5

need 196 feet clear span going into it, and the

SSCAD system shows the types of forms you
108 Structural Systems

can generate. This form was generated in less

than two or three minutes on the computer.

You basically define the outlines of the structure. You can generate the form. You can

manipulate and transform it.

Using color coding, we can color the outer

members, the diagonal members, the inner

members. The program enables the user to look

at a drawing and modify it, and make design

decisions and look at the options.

We find often when architects come to our

operations and spend a day with us designing in

their particular project; we can review 20 or 30

design concepts. In contrast, in the design profession, you say 50 percent of the time is spent

pushing a pencil. The result is that often the

first design on the paper typically is the last design on the paper. It doesn’t give you much

flexibility.

We went into network design because with

the complexity and the sophistication of buildings, you want the capability of many different

forms and shapes.

Figure 12 shows a ridge type of form, a

Stroh’s Beer project we’re building for a retrofit

project in Detroit. The geometry here was generated in less than one minute, the SSCAD system is all graphically oriented.

Figure 13 is a bottom view looking from the

fifth floor below. The architect wants to say,

“What am I looking at up inside the building?”

So we said we’ll move you in space down, and

look up inside the building itself.

Figure 14 is a multiple folded type plate

form, joins two buildings together, built over in

Somerset, New Jersey. Again, some new forms

which can be appropriate for the particular

application.

In network design, you can create almost

anything your mind can imagine. Basically you

can take your visions and you can put them into

reality.

A multi-folded plate for an entranceway for a

corporate headquarters, an exciting type of

forms. The folded plate is one type of space

frame form which has a lot of advantages.

You can also marry structures together. Figure 15 shows a cylindrical form with a dome on

top. This is a structure we did for the U.S.

Steel Corporation for an aquatic application for

Figure 6
Wendel R. Wendel 109

a tanker top which we did about six years ago.

I want to show you what the computers can

do besides generating just the graphics and the

design space. That’s only about ten percent of

the potential use of the computer systems in the

whole design and fabrication process.

This is a drawing which is color coded basically showing a structure. I’ll take a new GSA

building built in Boston. It has a big atrium, 90

feet by 120 feet. With computers you can basically see how the structure performs. We can

simulate the deflection that might result from a

snow load and model it very quickly, Figure 16

shows just the top members. You can see how

the geometry shows the plate action. You can

see the deflection of the structure towards the

center, and this way you can check it graphically. You can exchange so much more information, how a structure behaves, how it

works, using the computer system.

Different load magnitudes are shown by

color coding using the eight different colors on

the screen. You can show where the highest

compression loads are, what the highest tension

loads are. Computers can give you a feeling for

the network and new design freedom which you

couldn’t have by doing it by hand no matter

what happens. So the technological development of the computer systems have allowed the

development of network systems.

The system also drives plotters which we use

to produce assembly drawings of the structure.

Everything’s numbered, the different hub types,

all of the different strut types. The members

are numbered so you can ship it out in the

field. It takes about six minutes to draw it like

this, where by hand it would have taken us

eight hours three or four years ago. This gives

us gigantic productivity gains and hundred-,

sometimes thousand-fold reduction in time and

expenditures needed to design the structures.

The programs take the geometry and the

loads and convert them into actual fabrication

drawings. Then we run computer-controlled

equipment like our Wasino equipment, Japanese machines which are computerized controlled. Basically, we convert our design output

into paper tape forms or magnetic-tape forms

for production instructions.

We’ve been able to reduce all of the hand opFigure 7
———

110

Figure 8

Structural Systems

erations used to machine something. You create

a new design freedom. You create new types of

quality control because it’s computer run and

computer generated. There are fewer errors occurring, and the system gives you the capability

of variation very easily because we’ve standardized the process. The standard thing in Space

Structures is how we design, how we exchange

that information, not the final end product.

That means the network created can be very

variable to meet the particular project’s form

and requirements.

What we can do with the system is easily

generate a drawing like Figure 16, a bank structure with the whole space frame as the whole

network.

Figure 17 shows the actual structure under

construction. In this case, it’s built on the

ground, off to one side of where the actual

foundation is, and assembled. It’s an 80-by-80

foot space frame over in New Jersey. It’s a

bank building, and you just lift the structure up,

being relatively light weight, working in aluminum. You lift the structure up, put it in place,

and it basically starts to give you more and

more of the structural form assembled as a network.

Figure 18 shows a conical form, using the

ORBA Hub system, which certainly would not

have been possible without our system. Every

hub and each different row is different in the

geometry and its orientation. Computer-controlled machines can generate those easily.

Figure 19 shows structure assembly for a

project we did for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

in Chicago. We assemble it in three sections,

lift it up, put it in place, the main entranceway

for this office building, and here’s what it looks

like from the inside. Again, the cone form gave

SOM a new shape, a new form they could easily use. Somebody could easily fabricate it.

Figure 20 is a look up through the structure

itself. Figure 21 shows a barrel arch form,

which has certainly become very much more

popular during the last two or three years. People are learning the value of the old idea of the

arch which was a great shape back in Roman

and in medieval architectural times. Somehow

it became out of phase because the new materials didn’t allow it to be built very easily. With .
Wendel R. Wendel 111

more sophisticated building technology, you can

easily go back to the value and the benefits of

using the arch type of shape.

Figure 22 shows some of the hanger projects

we’re building throughout the world. We’re finishing one at Miami International Airport, a

226-foot clear span. Figure 23 shows how the

structure is assembled. We assembled it in

three sections on the ground, or multiple sections, depending upon its length and the design

requirements. The structure is built out of aluminum.

Figure 24 shows a step form at 1300 New

York Avenue in Washington, D. C., we are doing for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Figure 25

is a look up through the structure itself.

Different networks can have different forms

and shapes. Figure 26 shows one being built in

Culver City out in California right now.

Dome structures are also possible. Figure 27

shows a dome stadium, designed for Toronto,

capable of opening and closing. We’re talking

about worldwide the building industry not being

locally oriented. If you get into new technology,

it opens up the marketplace. Probably about ten

percent of our work is done overseas.

Tomorrow we see our movement where we’re

going to answer the phone at Space Structures

within three or four years. Somebody is going

to call up and say, “I want to build a space

frame.” The question will be back, “Is it

terrestrial, aquatic or space application?”

We have a new division at Space Structures

called Starnet Structures which is going after

the Space Program. It is the ‘Job Site in the

Sky Program.’

Figure 28 is a part of a Space City that we

have developed. We have our applications in to

two NASA contracts right now. We’ve been

talking to Grumman, Lockheed and Spar on

possible joint ventures going up to the Manned

Space Station Program.

The drawings are conceptual, what we call

cartoon drawings in the aerospace business —

what something could potentially be like. But

you have to think, if you’re in the building industry, on a galactic scale or else you’re going

to limit yourself, and the Japanese are going to

come in tomorrow.

Well, lets start thinking, you know, twenty

Figure 9 —
112 Structural Systems

years ahead of them and start moving in those

directions.

We should quickly talk about how structures

should have some structural art form to them.

We’re creating structures; we’re creating environments. They have to have a value to them

other than just enclosing and being a climatic

envelope. They should have a good design to

them, and the structures are more and more

with network design being able to be expressed

as structural forms, and I think it has a great

value like that.

Figure 29 is Caesar’s Palace out in Las Vegas, and is an example of all the structures at

Space Structures which are designed around

three basic goals: structural efficiency, project

economy and system elegance.

What’s the team work that’s being put together? We see ourselves as part of a new team.

In the past, teams typically combined architects/engineers, the general contractor and the

owner. We see two new members becoming involved in the initial design stages of the project.

Ourselves as a systems specialist, and a construction manager.

Almost 80 percent of all of our contracts are

negotiated; more than 50 percent of them right

at the front end of a project, typically under

Phase One of the contract. We work with architectural/engineering firms and help them in design and development during Phase One of a

project. With the computer systems, you’re able

to budget the project on the first day and trade

ideas back and forth. With the new team we

hold meetings at the beginning of a project, and

get everybody who is going to be involved with

the project at initial meetings. You can save

owners hundreds of thousands and millions of

dollars in a project if everybody who is a major

participant in the project comes together. We

have spent some long, twelve-hour sessions on

some projects. When everybody walks out of

the door, there has been participation. The areas of responsibility and their direction are

pretty well tied down. You can pick up from six

months to a year by expediting a project on the

way. The marketplace has recognized how important this organizational strategy is and has

responded.

Wendel R. Wendel is the President of Space Structures

International Corporation in Plainview, New York.

Figure 10
Wendel R. Wendel 113

Figure 11

Figure 12
114

Figure 13

Structural Systems

Figure 14
Wendel R. Wendel

Figure 15

Figure 16
116 Structural Systems

Figure 17

Figure 18
Wendel R. Wendel

Figure 19

117

Figure 20
118

Figure 21

Structural Systems
Wendel R. Wendel 119

Figure 24
120 Structural Systems

Figure 25
Wendel R. Wendel 121

Figure 27
122 Structural Systems

Figure 29
Materials

Albert Dietz

Albert Dietz

I might start off by saying that a great deal

of what I was going to say has already been

said, but I’ll have to repeat some of it just the

same.

First, I want to make a few general observations. I don’t know of any new or revolutionary

materials that are being used now or are immediately in sight, unless the space industry comes

up with some surprises.

That depends, of course, on what is meant by

“new” and “revolutionary.” Some people

might consider that some things I want to talk

about are new and revolutionary, but to me

they are not. They’re in the evolutionary stage.

They may have been considered new and revolutionary fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago.

They are now going through the stages that every new material has gone through, the long,

slow process of development and acceptance by

the industry.

Masonite took about twenty-five years to become a broadly accepted commodity. Gypsum

board is another instance. Even portland-cement concrete had to go through a long period

before it was generally accepted. That’s been

true of building materials right down the line,

and it’s true of the materials we’re talking

about today.

We can’t discuss all materials. I’m going to

concentrate as a case on the new group of materials and composites based on polymers. I

might review, however, very quickly some of

the older types of materials.

We have structural, nonstructural and auxiliary materials: Structural being those that carry

loads, including steel, concrete, timber, masonry; nonstructural, such as flooring and insulation; and auxiliaries, those materials such as

adhesives, sealants and coatings, which are used

in conjunction with other materials and may

not be seen at all. There are developments in all

of them but they are not particularly revolutionary.

Another classification of materials is non-metallic, metallic, organic, wastes and byproducts.

Developments are occurring in all of them but

none really revolutionary. There is one area,

however, in which a great deal can be done,

and in which there are real opportunities, and

that’s in waste and byproducts. We’re tearing

our cities down and having a terrible time trying to find out what to do with the rubble. We

ought to be doing a great deal more to determine how we can reuse that rubble rather than

throw it away and bury it somewhere. That’s a

tremendous challenge.

Byproducts are another great challenge. If

and when we ever solve the sulphur-dioxide

emissions problem, we’re going to have millions

of tons of sulphur in one form or another, and

what are we going to do with it? Byproduct

gypsum is one possibility, for example, and

there are many others. Sulphur can make a

very good concrete. It can also make a very

good road building material. There are many

wastes and byproducts, obviously, in which we

ought to be doing a great deal more than we

are, agricultural wastes, for example.

The wood industry has gone a long way.

What used to be considered wood waste and

was just burned because we didn’t know what

else to do with it now goes into chipboard, a

very valuable product. We’re using waste species we never had any use for before, making

them into strandboard and other boards, valuable products. These boards were made possible

by the advent of the high-strength synthetic adhesives. This introduces the field of combined

materials, or composites, the subject I’d like to

concentrate on.

What types of composites do we have? I’d

like to put them into three principal classes:

particulate, in which particles are embedded in

a matrix; fibrous, or fibers embedded in a matrix; and laminar, composed of sheet materials,

bonded together and possibly impregnated. Under laminar, is the special subclass of sandwiches.

The most important particulate building material is Portland-cement concrete, It has its

limitations, and by adding polymeric materials,

we can come up with some rather striking improvements.
The first approach is to impregnate standard

concrete with perhaps five to eight percent of a

material such as acrylic, to produce a three to

fourfold increase in compressive strength. Going

from 5,000 to 20,000 pounds per square inch

has not been unusual. Hardness also goes up, as

does resistance to impact. Resistance to freezing and thawing increases because the pores

have been filled. The difficulty is it’s a slow, arduous, expensive process, requiring autoclaving

or other means of impregnation and curing.

The second approach is to incorporate the

polymer while mixing the concrete, with variable results, some very good and some very

poor.

The third, is the substitution of a polymer for

the portland cement. In other words, concrete is

bonded with a polyester, for example, instead of

portland cement. The recently-built Harvard

Medical School Building (Figure 1 ) is an example. Wall panels are three inches thick, with

facings one-inch thick glass fiber-reinforcedpolyester concrete and core one inch of plastic

foam. No lengthy cure is needed, panels can be

made today, erected tomorrow. We don’t have a

fifty-year history of the material, a problem

common to many of new materials, I shall come

back to this.

In fibrous composites, a great deal is being

done. We’re taking a bit of a lead from the

space industry here in a crude sort of way. I

should like to use several examples.

The first is the United States building at the

Brussels World’s Fair in the 1950s. (Figure 2) It

has a 300-foot diameter, cable-supported roof

with translucent sandwich-type panels consisting

of glass fiber-reinforced polyester on an aluminum grid; light in weight, tough, strong, and

now being used quite widely for industrial, commercial, religious and school buildings: roofs

and sidewalls.

The next example illustrates the use of glassfiber-reinforced plastics in shell forms. One of

the problems with these materials is their low

Figure 1

Sandwich wall panel

with polyester-concrete

facings and foamedplastic cord
126 Materials

elastic modulus. Consequently, they have low

stiffness, and in order to make them work at

all, curved inherently-stiff shapes must often be

used.

Figure 3 shows the pavilions built for the

United States exhibition in Moscow twenty-five

years ago. They are 24 feet high, 16 feet across,

with canopies one-sixteenth inch thick and quarter-inch thick ribs, the stiffness coming about

more from the geometry than from the inherent

properties of the material itself.

The next illustration, (Figure 4), is another

shell form, the so-called House of the Future,

built in Disneyland about thirty years ago. It is

still the house of the future, but it was a pio

neering use of the shell in the form of a monocoque. It was originally designed to be up for

one year, was left up for ten and then posed a

real challenge to the wreckers when the site was

needed for something else.

Another composite application is a case history illustrating a number of interlocking factors

that have to be taken into account simultaneously. About twenty years ago, the Greater

London Council decided to use performance

specifications for the exterior cladding of a projected series of twelve 25-story apartment buildings for moderate-income housing. The

specifications said nothing about materials; but

called for resistance to 80 mile per hour winds,

a U factor of about 0.20, an acoustic

attenuation factor of about 35, one-hour fire

penetration resistance, essentially zero flame

spread, minimum thickness, minimum weight,

and about a thirty-year life without appreciable

maintenance. No materials were specified.

Out of many conferences came a composite

panel (Figure 5). The outer face was a pressmolded skin of glass fiber-reinforced polyester

loaded with mineral and turned out by a sportscar body manufacturer. The filling was foamed

concrete, weighing about 20 pounds per cubic

foot, reinforced with light wire. On the inside

was gypsum plaster, reinforced with glass fiber

and abestos, with a vapor seal and binder of bitumen between the gypsum and concrete. To allow for differential expansion and contraction,

the outer shell was bonded to the concrete with

expoxy adhesive and a thin layer of polyurethane foam.

Figure 2

Cable-supported translucent sandwich-panel roof

of United States building, Brussels World’s

Fair.
Albert Dietz 127

Figure 3

--

Glass fiber-reinforced

canopies and stalks, pavilions at United States

Exhibition in Moscow
128 Materials

Figure 4

Glass fiber-reinforced

monocaque structural

cantilevers, House of the

Future, Disneyland.

This was a composite of composites. It met

all of the requirements of the British Fire Research Station. It weighed 15 percent as much

as standard masonry or concrete construction.

The in-place cost as estimated by the builder

was more than competitive with the standard

construction, because of speed and ease of erection.

Four buildings were built, and then the other

eight were scrapped, not because of any technical problems. It was a technological success.

It was a sociological failure. People refused to

move into 25-story buildings. They just didn’t

want to live in them.

When only four buildings were built instead

of twelve, the economics changed. Subsequently, five-story buildings were built, and

standard masonry construction was just as competitive as the composite panel.

This case illustrates a number of things. Performance specifications made possible the marriage of a number of different materials to

perform the overall requirements. The result

was generally successful. Over the twenty years

the panels have been up, they have behaved

quite well. There have been some blemishes

which had to be repaired in situ.

The repairs, though successful, show. The

patches don’t match the original material, and

little spots appear on the surfaces.

The heavy aluminum windows were a failure

and had to be replaced, with some damage to

the panels, requiring repairs. A hot fire in one

apartment broke through windows and scorched

the outside surface, but did not spread (Figure

6).

The engineers are in favor of the system, but

it has not been used again.

One problem was: who would produce these

panels? There was no existing industry. The little engineering firm that undertook this job had

to scramble around and find a panel molder in

Ohio, various suppliers in the British Isles, and

bring all of the elements together in one place,

where the builder assembled them off site and

erected them, using the same equipment as for

the rest of the building.

This is a capsule illustrating some of the

things that can be done with composites, and

some of the problems that occur when we try to
Albert Dietz 129

.

.,

0.0 “ “ ,. “ “ “,. o * o . ‘

“ “ co . ‘i ‘“ o

.,” o

. . ,.

Figure 5

Composite wall panels.

Greater London Council

buildings.

o

Figure 6

Greater London Council

building showing the outside structure.
130 Materials

introduce a fairly new material.

What are some of the probable future developments? What are some of the effects on the

building industry? Plastics in general and the

composites by and large lend themselves best to

shop fabrication. They’re not good when it

comes to field fabrication, You can’t take a

hammer and saw and cut off some pieces and

nail them together. The trend is toward more

and more shop fabrication of finished components, and this is where plastics and composites

fit in particularly well, right in line with the

trend. New processes are involved, however,

with which the building industry is not acquainted. Sometimes big presses are needed,

sometimes materials and product handling are

different. Builders will have to get used to

them.

New building, forms are possible. The House

of the Future, for example, looks entirely different from a standard house. The tension form

for the Jedda Airport in Saudi Arabia (Figure

7), consisting of about 500,000 square feet of

Teflon-coated glass fabric, is another example

of a new type of form. It’s a tent. At the Osaka

Figure 7 \

Fair, the United States building — air-supported, vinyl-coated glass fabric — was another

type of form made possible by the new materials (Figure 8).

Perhaps we can make contribution to energy

conservation. The plastic foams are among the

best insulators that we have from the standpoints of efficiency and use. There also can be

problems with them as we found out with the

formaldehyde.

Perhaps we shall have contributions from the

Space Program. In any event, we shall find that

our usual methods of fabricating parts for

buildings will undergo changes as we bring in

unfamiliar materials including plastics, other

polymers and composite materials.

Now, what are some of the influences affecting use of unfamiliar materials? One major influence retarding the rapid adoption of these

materials is uncertainty, particularly in two directions. The first is, how do they behave in

fire? Many are organic materials. Any organic

material can be destroyed by a hot enough fire.

So how do we get around the problem of their

susceptibility to fire? Of course, we use many

Tent roofs, 45 meters

square, Teflon-coated

glass fabric, Jeddah Airport.

.

. *
Albert Di`etz 131

materials in buildings that are susceptible to

fire. That’s not a new situation, but there are

new aspects to it with respect to plastics, and

the fire tests that we generally make may or

may not be directly applicable to these new materials.

There’s a great deal of work that needs to be

done on fire evaluation generally, and not only

for plastics and composites. This activity will

have to be carried on somewhere.

The second question is long life, longevity.

How will these materials stand up for a long period of time? Here we come to a question of

definition. If you talk to the plastics people,

“Oh, sure, these things will stand up for a long

time.”

“what do you mean?”

“Oh five or ten years.” A building five years

old is practically brand new, out of the box, and

when you tell them, “No, we’re not interested

in that, but we want at least twenty-five, thirty

years, preferably fifty years,” the surprised reaction is likely to be, “Oh, no, we can’t promise

that.” So there is the question. We do not have

good ways of predicting long life, especially

with new types of materials. This is another

field in which a great deal of work needs to be

done.

There are other things we could talk about:

education, activities abroad, and many more.

There are several areas for concentration.

I’ve already mentioned two. One is fire, and I

mean fundamental work on fire, not just

ASTM tests. These are very good tests and we

have very good commercial establishments for

running tests. We need fundamental research

such as fire modeling and how to go from a

small-scale test to prediction of actual behavior

in large-scale fire. This kind of research is not

the province of any one company. It will be up

to Government agencies, such as the Bureau of

Standards, which is doing good work, but is vulnerable to changes in government policy. Universities can contribute to such research. This

type of work needs to be carried along and fully

supported for an extended period.

Long-term prediction is another area. We do

not yet know how to make a short-time test

which will accurately predict how materials, especially new and familiar ones, will behave over

Figure 8

Air-supported vinylcoated glass fabric roof,

United States Building,

Osaka Expo ’70 Fair.
132 Materials

a long period of time. So we have our test racks

facing south Florida and Maine and try to get

some idea from them, but those results are both

limited and slow.

Information dissemination; this has been

raised before, and is a serious deficiency. Information just doesn’t get around well in the

building industry. There are thousands and

thousands of small-scale builders, and it’s hard

to get the information around. It’s very hard to

get it together in the first place. It’s there somewhere in somebody’s file, but it’s not getting

around.

We don’t know how our materials really behave in our buildings. These buildings constitute

the biggest laboratory in the world, but we

don’t really make a systematic study of our materials in place, and therefore, we can’t develop

tests that will adequately predict their behavior.

The question of codes has been brought up

earlier. They are important, no question about

it. Codes can stand in the way of the use of new

materials. The question of performance codes

has been raised. A performance code calls for a

needed upgrading of the abilities of our building

inspectors. You can’t have a performance code

and just any political appointee going out looking at your buildings to determine if they

comform to performance codes.

We ought to have systems of evaluations,

such as are found in some of the European

countries, which we don’t have here. These

things are among the aspects that we have to

consider, and perhaps this panel should be

thinking about them when looking into materials.

Albert Dietz is Professor Emeritus of the School of Architecture and Planning, of the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology
9

Commercial Building

Designs

Charles H. Thornton

Charles H. Thornton

1 would like to address the subject of changes

in building design, materials and processes as

seen from the designer’s side. My area of activity is the design of commercial, institutional,

and multi-story residential buildings. Structural

engineers tend to not get too involved in onestory, single-family residential buildings, but

more in the high-rise, multi-level type of construction.

Recently in the New York Times, about

three or four weeks ago, there was an article

about the cost to construct a project in New

York City which pointed out an interesting fact:

To bring a condominium on line in New York

City now runs $300 per square foot. One hundred dollars is construction cost, $100 is land

cost, and $100 is interim financing and soft

costs.

So we can sit here and address the problem

of construction costs, how to do things, how

emerging technologies are going to affect construction costs from a design side and a construction side, but we’re really only addressing

one-third of the situation. The land cost is beyond my ability to discuss, but the financing

costs and the length of time and the process

from the time you conceive a project to the

time you occupy the project is the area in which

I think a major revolution is probably going to

take place in the next decade. That’s probably

where the major cost savings and major technological changes will occur. They’re not going to

be technological in the sense of high tech, but

they’re going to be more within the process of

construction,

I’d like to address the design, materials and

processes aspects. From the design point of

view, computers obviously are going to be the

entity which will revolutionize the design business. It’s happening already. The things that

Wendel R. Wendel talked about, all of that sort

of thing, it’s coming rapidly. It’s in our office

now. It’s in a lot of offices — the ability to do

these things, do them quicker, do them better,

look at more options and alternatives are all

here.

But the big revolution is going to be the interfacing of the software in the computer systems within the design office with the rest of

the construction team, and right now that hasn’t

happened. This is where there’s really going to

be a revolution,

Wendel’s doing it because he controls his total destiny. The present design, fabrication,

erection and construction process is very spread

out, diverse and fragmented, I think the process

is going to come together — that’s where a lot

is going to happen. CAD and computers are obviously going to be a big step in the right direction.

As far as structural engineering of multistory buildings, as far as floor systems are concerned, we really have reached the optimum.

We really can’t get any lighter than we have

with present materials. We use steel. We use

concrete. Anybody that’s attempted to get it

lighter has had floor levelness problems, deflection problems and all sorts of human-perceptibility-to-motion problems. We have, in my

opinion, reached the optimum in floor design.

If we take the example of a typical building,

a forty-story, high-rise office building, it takes

about ten pounds of structural steel per square

foot of floor area to support gravity loads.

That’s the material in the floors and the columns. But it takes a total of about 20 pounds of

structural steel per square foot when you get

done. The additional ten pounds of steel is to resist wind. If you go sixty stories or eighty stories, the 10 pounds for gravity loads remains

fairly constant, but the contributing portion of

the steel material to resist wind loadings is

where the big weight increases start to pile up.

We could fool ourselves and attempt to make

the floor lighter, but if we’re going to get much

lighter than ten pounds, we will get sued when

the floor deflects or bounces too much.

What’s interesting is that Wendel’s slides primarily addressed roof structures, enclosure

structures and the monumental or the architectural centerpiece of a project, which is the exciting part of the project. However, when you
look at percentages of area within a building

project, probably five percent of the area is in

that part, and 95 percent is the floors. So going

back to this point of the floors, I’m not saying

space trusses can’t be used for floors. We’re using truss systems in office buildings now because we’re up to 45-foot spans. We want to get

mechanical penetrations and make it a ‘smart’

building. There is one major developer, Oxford,

from Canada and the United States, who uses

truss systems in all its buildings. There’s no reason why space truss systems couldn’t be used in

the same thing.

Trusses allow you to open up an interstitial

space in the floor to allow all of the mechanical

systems to go through. Unfortunately, when you

compare it to conventional trusses and conventional beams, it’s still too expensive, but I think

it’s going to get there. As more people like

Wendel get involved and bring this total capability together, I think there are good chances

there.

Moving to the wind system and the NASA

group, I’ll use one example. Around 1965, as we

were designing an 800-foot observation tower in

Milwaukee, we sat back and said, “The gravityload-resisting components of the project constitute about 10 percent of the job.” It was not an

occupied building — it was an observation

tower. Ninety percent of the structural material

was required to resist wind loadings. But what

is wind loading? Maximum design wind loading

is a one-inane-hundred-years mean recurrence

interval. We design for a situation that happens

once every one hundred years. Now, that could

happen next year, which it usually does, but

you’re putting in 90 percent of the material in a

special tall tower to resist a one-in-one-hundredyears occurrence. Why not try a different approach?

NASA, when they move the Saturn V from

the assembly building to the launch pad, has a

system of servo-mechanism, hydraulically-activated jacks to keep the Saturn V in a fairly vertical position. So we called up General Motors,

Delco Division, who did that work, and we

asked whether or not it was possible to develop

an active system which would sense acceleration, velocity and drift or motion of a tall tower

and activate hydraulic jacks in the building connected to cables that extend from the top of the

tower to the foundations. So when the building

moves, accelerates or displaces, these jacks activate and the building is brought back to a vertical position.

Obviously, the concern is that the system

could go out of whack and go in the opposite direction. Because, if the building is moving away

from the wind, you want the activated jack on

the windward side. If it’s jacking on the leeward side, you’ve got a problem since it will

magnify, not reduce, the movement.

Delco came in and priced the system, and

confirmed that it was totally reliable. This was

1965. We’ve come a long way with home computers and other sophisticated control systems

since then. My feeling is that this active system

approach in taller buildings, to eliminate the

need of putting 50 to 90 percent of the material

into the building to resist a one-in-one-hundredyears occurrence, is probably an area that people should be looking at. It can be done!

The Citicorp Building in New York City and

the John Hancock Building in Boston both have

tuned-mass dampers at their tops. Now, these

are not active systems. they are really passive

systems because they sort of lag behind and

slow down the motion of the building. In the

mechanical machine design area, tuned-mass

dampers have been prevalent for years. A

tuned-mass damper is a device that stops vibration. It vibrates out of phase with the building

and slows it down. It works in buildings, although it is not really an active system. I think

that is one area in which major innovations are

going to develop,

Another way to try and do something technologically advanced is to reduce the amount of

material in a high-rise building by doing what

the home-building industry has done with the

use of stress-skin plywood. Stop and think about

it. There’s no wind analysis done by an engineer

on a one-family residence building, right? Wind

stability of a one-family residence is inherent in
136 Commercial Building Designs

the adhesion of the plywood through nails or

glue to the stick-built system. Until the plywood

is put on the building, the frame is sort of flexible. The plywood forms a stressed skin.

Well, the skin, using Professor Tucker’s figures, becomes one of the two major cost components of a building, along with the structure. If

we can integrate the skin or enclosure into a

structural system, we can achieve real economy.

We tried it recently on a very successful

project in Pittsburgh for U.S. Steel Realty. It

was nice that we were working for U.S. Steel

Realty; they encouraged us to use an exposed

steel solution. It’s a fifty-five-story building. It

was called the Dravo Building, but then it became the Mellon Bank Center Building. It uses

a quarter-inch-thick steel facade. It’s the architectural skin with the windows mounted in it.

But it’s also a valuable part of the structural

system. Without it, the drift of the building is

double the magnitude that we deem acceptable

by human perceptibility acceptance standards.

With the stressed steel skin, the movement is reduced to one-half the magnitude.

We have an internal skeletal structure of columns and beams which safely resist wind from

a stress point of view. However, the drift at the

top of the building would be 36 inches (H/250).

When we put the one-quarter-inch-thick steel

skin on, it acts as a stressed-skin, and we bring

the drift down to 18 inches (H/500).

We ran into an interesting problem in the

process. Exposed steel is not fireproof. So we

went to the Pittsburgh Building Department

and convinced them that the chances of a fire

totally enveloping the entire exterior skin on the

building were quite remote. By the time that

happened, if it could happen, the building

would be unoccupied, and if the drift were

twice what we felt was acceptable by human

perceptibility, there’d be nobody in the building

to perceive it anyway, so they accepted it.

It’s a new concept. It’s a concept of safety

versus human perceptibility and comfort. Codes

do not prescribe any drift or any acceleration

controls. There are no human perceptibility

limits on controls within the codes. The codes

only address safety.

Both the use of an active system and the

integration of the exterior skin in the wind drift

control system are areas where I feel the building industry will make major revolutions in the

design and construction of taller buildings.

Fireproofing. The steel industry has been

wrestling with this problem for years, but if

someone could come up with an inexpensive,

thin, easily applied, durable fireproofing system

for structural steel, I think you would see a major revolution in construction.

The aerospace industry has developed intumescence paints and sublimination coating materials. They’re still too expensive. They are

available, but somebody should try to develop a

low cost fire-proofing coating system that is

architecturally acceptable. This would change a

lot of what architects do in terms of structural

expression. It would eliminate all of the materials that get sprayed on after which everybody

spends millions of dollars trying to cover them

up so you don’t see them. Some of the already

available materials, particularly some of these

subliming paints, actually look like an enamel

finish. They’re excellent, but too expensive.

Let’s jump to materials. Steel and concrete

are the two major structural construction materials. I have attended a lot of meetings with

many people who try to introduce composites

(fiberglass, boron, and graphite laminates) into

the construction industry. The reason it’s not

coming in, besides the other reasons that Al

mentioned, is that concrete costs only six cents

a pound; people lose sight of that. It’s probably

the cheapest, most abundant material around,

and steel at 60 cents a pound, fabricated and

erected with its strength ratio between concrete

and steel is about one to ten is also a bargain.

Concrete is six cents a pound; steel is 60 cents a

pound. So you use ten times as much concrete

at one-tenth the price, and as Professor Tucker

mentioned a minute ago, when you run out the

numbers in most major cities and you look at

the concrete and the form work versus the steel

and the metal deck with the concrete, they both

come out to be $6.00 to $8.00 per square foot.

They’re competitive. You can’t get it any better

than that, and so I don’t see much revolution

happening in the area of structural systems unless the new material’s cost can be reduced.

We, on occasion, have ventured into the

development of esoteric materials for structures,
Charles H. Thornton 137

We usually end up getting very frustrated and

disappointed with the result. About twelve years

ago we developed a paper bridge for the international Paper Company. It was meant to be a

television commercial, but we found the material to have fantastic potential. Paper is a marvelous material, and we thought it had fantastic

applications for concrete formwork and disposable formwork. You can make it waterproof,

you can make it fireproof, and it’s stronger

pound for pound than concrete. It’s basically

processed wood when you think about it. It has

never caught on as a construction material. The

paper industry never caught on to it, but there’s

no reason why paper in a honeycomb, cellulartype system could not be developed as a

formwork system for concrete. It just hasn’t

happened to date.

We’ve found that most new developments in

the area of materials occur in what I call adaptive use of off-the-shelf items. It’s probably an

area that should be looked at further. A few

years ago we designed and engineered several

superbay hangers for American Airlines in California. Each building held four 747s. We took

an H.H. Robertson or Inland-Ryerson type cellular electrified deck for a typical office building floor and applied it to a hyperbolic

paraboloid structure. We used simple spot

welds. It worked marvelously. This 230-foot

catilever structure had only about ten pounds of

steel per square foot in it. We were supposed to

build eight of them. We only built two, and no

one has done another one since.

In order to achieve this innovative structure,

we had to deviate from normal practice. The

process was brought together. We were the engineers. None of the contractors wanted to analyze the erection schemes; so we analyzed the

erection schemes. Nobody knew how to maintain the quality control on the part of the contractor; so we set up the contractor’s quality

control manual. We stuck our necks out relative

to normal responsibilities and it worked.

There is a great tendency toward

fragmention and diversity in our industry. I

think the whole role of the designer and the

constructor has to be redefined. There have

been many recent conferences, papers and hearings about designers (architects and engineers)

skirting their responsibilities relative to design

of steel connections, for example.

There are hearings going on in Missouri right

now to try and revoke a structural engineer’s license for the Kansas City Hyatt collapse. The

engineer is saying it was the contractor’s responsibility. The contractor is saying it was the engineer’s responsibility. When you go and look at

the American Institute of Steel Construction

(AISC) specification in depth, you find that it’s

really very confusing as to who is really responsible.

What has happened is, although engineers

and architects have wanted to get more involved in the construction process, their insurance company, lawyer, ASCE, AIA, ACEC,

and everybody else involved has said, “You

shall not be involved in construction means and

methods. You shall not be involved in erection

sequences. Stay out of it. Don’t use the word

‘approved’. Don’t get involved, and keep it fragmented.”

Well, in spite of this approach for the last

twenty years, there are still too many problems

and too many lawsuits. I think what’s happening is the ACEC, ASCE and AIA are starting

to come back and say, “I think that the designers have to play a bigger role in the construction process.” Further justification of more

involvement is in the fact that one-third of the

project cost relates to an interim financing cost.

Designers should get closer to the construction

process through their computers (CAD) and

link the design to the construction by taking

contract documents and converting them into

mill orders and shop drawings (CAM) to bring

the whole process together. That’s really where

the big savings can take place.

Here are a couple of examples. Turner Construction Co., on a $80 million Westin Hotel recently built in Boston, decided they were going

to slip-form the concrete core of the project. No

one had ever done it before in Boston. I told

them I thought they were crazy because of the

difficult local trade jurisdictions and strong

unions in Boston. But they decided they were

going to take a crack at it. They brought the

unions into the picture early and made them

part of the process.

Since Turner was involved as the construc-
138 Commercial Building Designs

tion manager early in the game, we, as designers, agreed to use a slip-formed core. We also

agreed we would use a flying-form system, and

we would design the precast facade so that it

could be incorporated into the flying-form system. So when the building form went up, the

precast pieces went up with it, and when they

poured the floor, they inserted the windows,

and in record time they had an enclosed building so that the other trades could come in and

work on the remaining systems within an enclosed, heated environment.

Had we not worked together on the approach

in the early stages, it would have been a much

more conventional building, We got involved in

the process and it paid off for the project.

Olympia & York, the developer of the World

Financial Center at Battery Park City in New

York, tried to apply what they do in Canada to

New York. They deserve a lot of credit — they

got halfway. What they did is interesting. They

incorporated the material-handling systems that

are needed during the construction into the basic design of the building. The elevator shafts

are sized so that all materials go up and down

inside the building, not on an exterior materials

hoist.

For a conventional project, we never know in

advance who the contractor will be. As a result,

we don’t bother to try to accommodate the design to facilitate materials handling to be facilitated. Do you know what the cost of a lift on

the outside of a building is? With post-modernist design solutions, with setbacks when you get

up to the sixtieth floor and you’ve got to get

over 60 feet to reach the exterior wall (how do

you get it from here to there?) it’s a big problem!

So the recent tendency to have buildings

with setback tops could swing us more to central materials-handling systems. It is obvious

that construction managers and general contractors as well as designers have to be more involved in that total process. This will save time

and money.

In summary, I think in the immediate future

further impacts will be in the area of computer

usage; integration of various building systems;

the exterior walls and the structure; gradual acceptance of new materials; and a whole change

in the delivery process. Big changes are going to

result from these impacts.

The other obstacle is the impediments, which

everybody has talked about; unions, special interest groups, codes, jurisdictions and, from a

designer’s side, fear of litigation. It’s gotten to

the point where most, if not all, of the United

States’ design industry is not innovating any

more because of fear of litigation. It really

doesn’t pay to innovate any more, because the

chance of getting nailed, in our litigious society,

is almost predictable. There may not be too

many attorneys in Japan, but there are too

many attorneys and too much litigation, too

many frivolous lawsuits against the practice of

architects, engineers, medical doctors, etc., in

the U.S. today. This aspect of our industry is

hurting the advancement of, and innovation

with, the American design and construction industry.

Dr. Charles H. Thornton is President of Lev Zetlin Associates, Inc.
10 Over the Horizon

Raymond P. Whitten

Raymond P. Whitten

I’ll begin with a review of what NASA is do

ing in Technology Utilization; and then discuss

some of the complications of technology transfer. The infusion of technology into our society

is very difficult, and I will give some examples

of the impediments. Nothing happens through

serendipity. The process is “people intensive.”

Even though NASA technologies may be

useful to the building industries, it’s going to

take work to couple that technology with industry needs. Our program works with industry and

the user community. We do not unilaterally develop prototypes and certainly do not do commercialization or marketing.

NASA can learn a lot from the progressive

building industry’s thinking in terrestrial applications. This will be evolving as we move into

Space Station and Lunar Exploration. NASA

has a system in place that is both a paperwork

and a ‘hands-on’ people-to-people process. We

have developed ways to disseminate technology

as it is documented through a Scientific and

Technical Information Center and have provialed for a Computer Operated Software Management Information Center (COSMIC). This

systemcan be tapped by industry, U.S. citizens,

state and local governments and universities at

any time. Both information and computer programs coming out of NASA and other federal

laboratory programs are available through the

system.

The Applications Engineering Program is

people intensive. It’s in this program that we

identify and define user needs. Once the problem is fully understood, our scientists and engineers try to match NASA-developed technology

to the problem. If there is a match, a working

partnership is developed between the user and

NASA. If a successful match is found, industrial or business development leads to marketing and commercialization of the technology.

Our network is located around the various

NASA Centers. It consists of the Industrial

Applications Centers (IAC’s), COSMIC and a

Technology Applications Team. The system

serves industry and the public by providing information, retroactive technology searches, and

‘hands-on’ assistance in problem solving. There

are some small fees involved for IAC and COSMIC services and a required commitment of

funding in application engineering. The Industrial Applications Centers are kept current on

evolving NASA technologies through the various NASA Centers and/or laboratories. Evolving technologies are summarized or documented

in various NASA publications. Some of these

publications are called NASA Tech Briefs, Annual Technology Utilization Reports, NASA

Patent Abstracts, Research and Technology Operating Plans, Special Publications and Technical Memoranda, Scientific and Engineering

Journal Articles, etc.

Transfer of technology from these programs

to the building industry or anywhere else does

not happen without a lot of elbow grease, technology ‘know-how,’ motivation and support from

upper management. All NASA technology that

eventually ends up being used for nonaerospace

applications must go through some form of

adaptive engineering in order to satisfy the

needs of the new problem. I have yet to see a

one-to-one transfer, i.e., a situation where the

aeronautics or space technology can simply

plug into the new application without some

form of modification.

Examples:

Several new technologies can be applied to

fire protection. For instance, we have used

NASA turbo-pump technology to develop a

new water-pumping system with a flow of 3-5

thousand gallons per minute at 150 psi. Acceptance of this technology has been slow even

though it is badly needed. Conversion to this

type of equipment requires new thinking in the

fire-fighting community. It requires training

and an expensive marketing effort. The firefighting module, as we call it, can be lifted by

helicopter and placed almost anywhere — cities, rural areas, forests, aboard ship. In addition

to its use in fighting fires, it can provide drinking water to ports serving countries facing se-
vere drought, or even used to salvage oil in

areas where spills have taken place at sea.

The power-factor controller, which I’m sure

all of you have heard something about, was developed conceptually within NASA. It is now

found in industry and large buildings. It is even

used in energy management of escalators. This

system is based on electronic technology available today throughout the industry. It took the

creative efforts of an aerospace engineer to conceive and develop the concept.

Several years ago NASA and HUD worked

together with some aspects of the building industry to develop the NASA Tech House at

the Langley Research Center. NASA is pretty

good at systems engineering. In the case of the

Tech House we demonstrated how one could

systematically develop an energy-efficient house

using state-of-the-art and innovative technology.

To evaluate the concept, the Tech House was

literally wired for sound, similar to the way we

would technically monitor the performance of a

new experimental vehicle. In fact, we are still

monitoring, collecting and evaluating data. The

data that NASA collected pertained to operation of solar collectors, solar panels, electronic

systems and water management; it was analyzed for efficiency, reliability and maintainability.

The Flat Conductor Cable is an example of

how difficult it is to bring new technology to the

building industry. It has been about twelve

years since the concept of transferring aircraft

and space vehicle flat conductor cable to the

building industry was tried. NASA developed

the technology to save weight, space and energy. It is just now becoming available, for nonaerospace use, as a marketable product. For

retrofitting or remodeling homes, offices or factories, it offers a fairly simple solution. For new

house design, it could be integrated with composite materials to develop new concepts for

modular and mobile wall structures. Improvements could be seen in outlet placement and

energy management.

As you know, NASA is confronted with water and waste management problems in aircraft

and spacecraft. Reuse of water will be especially critical in future manned space missions.

Future concepts and resulting technologies are

becoming available and could be applied to the

building industry. Why build on our best and

most fertile land when water and waste management systems provide alternative solutions. The

extreme is to take waste or gray water and

make it safe and potable drinking water. Gray

water can be recycled many times for wash water. Energy and land management conservation

methods can be employed if one is willing to apply the technology and change traditional ways

of doing things. Some of these concepts have

been demonstrated in the NASA/HUD Tech

House; however, the concepts are not being rapidly adopted or put into practice.

There are several technologies that are on the

horizon and will be seen in the near future. The

REDOX energy storage system, which is an

oxidation reduction system, is representative of

such a technology. The NASA Lewis Research

Center and the Department of Energy have

been working on this technology for many

years. The idea was derived from the fuel-cell

technology developed for U.S. spacecraft. Essentially, this is a type of battery storage system

that is going to become available and marketable in the near future. In order to transfer the

technology, NASA is working with SOHIO.

SOHIO is investing in a demonstration program

that will eventually lead to small community,

industry and, perhaps, individual home use of

the REDOX technology. Imagine a community

that is using the REDOX system; it stores its

energy in a cost-effective manner and offloads

it or sells it back to the power company as

opportunities develop. The key to the system is

a reduction/oxidation system with soluble liquid

electrodes which make energy requirements independent of power demand.

Another evolving concept is the Magnetic

Heat Pump. This technology is based on the

fact that certain magnetic materials discharge

and absorb large amounts of heat when strong

magnetic fields are alternately applied and removed. In theory, the ideal magnetic cycle is
142 Over the Horizon

more efficient than the ideal evaporation cycle

that utilizes freon for refrigeration and heat

pumping. Heat transfer considerations suggest a

superior efficiency for magnetic pumping and

analytic studies predict lower capital cost for

machines above 50-100 kW cooling or heating

power. The higher predicted efficiency of magnetic cycles would have a favorable economic

impact through lower operating power requirements, and considerable fuel savings, in a wide

range of applications that includes heating and

air conditioning, industrial process refrigeration,

air separation (for steel plants), and heat pump

ing for process heating.

Heat pipe technology, one of the first real examples of practical applications of this technology outside of the Space Program, is seen in

the Alaskan pipeline where it controlled the permafrost in the ground. All spacecraft tend to

use the heat pipe technology to control, balance

and maintain desired spacecraft internal temperatures. This management of solar energy and

heat pipe technology is now finding its way into

domestic use. Today, the Kennedy Space Center is working with several companies in hopes

of using this technology for home, office and/or

large building air conditioning systems. It is

speculated by some that future homes may effectively use heat and electricity that is derived

from solar energy, ground heat, heat and electrical storage systems and heat pipes. The heat

pipes will allow heat to be moved from place to

place while sophisticated battery systems will

accommodate electrical energy storage.

The future holds a promise for new techniques in structural analysis, nondestructive and

non-invasive testing of materials. At the Langley Research Center a major effort is underway

in ultrasound technology. Here, instead of looking at the torque stress in bolts, the torque on

the bolt is viewed as friction. NASA scientists

are looking at the elongation of the bolt and the

resulting stress. The Langley scientists have

been so successful in demonstrating this concept

that the Space Shuttle, U.S. mines, aircraft and

other systems requiring bolts as fasteners are

applying ultrasound as a noninvasive stress

tester. There could be many applications of this

technology in the building industry.

Earlier we discussed robotics and automation. NASA is not the leader in new robot or

automation technology, and it doesn’t plan to

be in the future. NASA can help U.S. industry

move ahead in automation and robotics by exploiting its specially developed sensing, computer, image enhancing and display

technologies. At the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab

oratory, NASA and industry are working together to transfer some spacecraft sensing

technology to develop ‘smart robots.’ These robets are being developed to have enough visual

image information to see edges and corners and

adjust accordingly. The technology stems from

highly specialized integrated circuitry, chips,

proximity sensors, microprocessors, etc. The

technology transfer here is not the robot — it is

the special components that the machine needs

in order to respond to the environmental challenge.

There is also pultrusion technology, and

CAD/CAM systems that can be applied to the

building industry. The concept is similar to that

described as evolving in Japan. The idea is that

you program what you want and, based upon

your computer design, the automated machinery provides you with studs, wall panels, doors,

shingles, ‘I’ beams, etc., all to the precise stress

and other measurements you call for in your

building design. Plasma-coating material has potential for future applications of glass materials

and ceramics. The plasma coatings that were

developed for the astronauts visors to prevent

scratching and fogging are now being applied to

windows and sun glasses.

The crystal and other types of materials that

are going to be developed in space may have an

application that allows for greater automation

and computer power. Future energy systems

may become a magnitude more effective than

they are now, which will allow for smaller,

smarter, and more powerful tools that require

less energy, less time and maintenance, and

help mankind work with greater precision and

safety.

The Programmable Implantable Medication

System or PIMS might also apply to the building industry. The outer case for the PIMS is

made out of titanium, developed for the aeronautics industry. The internal working parts of

the PIMS are electronic microprocessors. The
Raymond F. Whitton

microprocessor in this device is approximately

equivalent to the IBM-105O. It can operate over

fifty color TV sets. It can program microliters

of medication into the body as prescribed by

the physician. The physician can reprogram the

PIMS anywhere in this country, or in the world

for that matter, as long as he has a phone

modem between the patient and himself. The

concept is based on our satellite and telecommunications capability. The electronics technology is derived from our spacecraft and satellite

technology while the fluid management system

comes from the Viking lander that landed on

Mars and tested the Martian soil for life forms.

Imagine a device the size of a hockey puck implanted in the body providing biological functions through microminiaturization of many

component parts that would have taken the

space of a ten foot by eight foot by two foot

thick wall only fifteen years ago.

Now, what I’m saying here is that none of

the technology that has gone into this system

could have been applied without taking the

time to understand the problem and applying

imagination and technical ‘know-how’. There is

a lot of space technology that is unused; many

applications could undoubtedly be made for the

building industry. For example, the concept of

infusion pumps has been studied and developed

for medical use during the last several decades

by the National Institutes of Health. Working

with the Johns Hopkins University, the National Institutes of Health, and industry, the

PIMS represents several years of time compression since the total development took less than

three years. The cost to NASA was $1,6 million

over three-and-a-half years, while the industry

investment will exceed $30 million (estimated)

to place the device in the market. In this case,

the government was the catalyst as it stimulated

a business opportunity by using unrelated technology to address and solve a complicated problem.

Raymond P. Whitten is Chief of the Terrestrial Applications Technology Utilization Office at the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration

143
—.

Eberhard

Reflections on the

Presentations

John P. Eberhard

James Gross

Our purpose here is to anticipate how technological change will affect the building industry

either from the supply side or from the demand

side and to determine whether any of these

changes could create problems that Congress

ought to be aware of and, potentially do something about.

A. The Six Construction Industries

Here in Washington we often choose to talk

about the ‘building industry,’ and discuss issues

like changes in the levels of employment,

changes in quality and safety, changes in productivity, changes in opportunities and risks

from foreign competition, as if it were a single

industry. I don’t think this makes much sense.

In many ways the building industry is no

more monolithic than the transportation industry. The transportation industry includes the

airlines industry, the railroad industry, the

trucking industry, and the shipping industry.

There is little crossover between the organizations, the institutions, the skilled manpower, the

technologies, and the R&D base that are utilized by those sectors of the transportation industry.

Practically no Federal policy can affect each

of the separate industries within transportation.

But since you don’t want too many units that

report to the President, you can create a Department of Transportation and lump all of

those things that have to do with movement under it. It also is useful to talk about a transportation industry for economists who want to

make measures of the national economic sectors. It avoids having that many more pages of

statistics if you can somehow or other have a

number that represents the contribution of the

transportation industry to the gross national

product.

The building industry, or the building industries, as I prefer to call them, are combined for

much the same reason. It makes sense to look

at the several building industries if what one

wants to identify is expected changes in the industry.

For our purposes, it seems to me there are six

industries which react quite differently to those

kinds of issues:

■

m

■

■

The first is the housing industry — the collection of organizations, technologies, skills

and financial mechanisms whose purpose is to

convert raw land, usually purchased on a

speculative basis, into dwelling units that can

be sold or rented to individuals and families.

The major distinction for the purpose of analysis is that this process is begun before there

is a buyer in mind. The builder of these

houses builds a house against a potential market, not against clients who come to them and

say, “These are our needs, and we want a

house of this kind.” Very few houses in the

country are done that way, and I put those in

the fourth category.

The second is what I call the manufactured

building industry. I call this a separate industry because it is a collection of organizations,

technology, labor and financial mechanisms

whose purpose is not to convert land into

buildings, but rather to manufacture off-site

units that are anywhere from the whole unit

to subassemblies, which can be transported to

the site. A few companies like the Ryland

Corporation own house manufacturing capabilities, as well as build conventionally, and

I’m sure we can find all kinds of exceptions

at the margin for each of these.

The third industry I call the commercial developers. I mean by this people who buy raw

land and convert it into buildings other than

housing — people who develop industrial

parks, people who develop shopping centers,

or people who develop office buildings.

Again, the character of this industry is that

there is no client in advance, There’s a prospective market out there, and there’s land,

and there’s an investment to be made in

building something on this land which will

eventually be leased or sold to a set of users

which will emerge.

The fourth industry, is the one that most of us
think about when we talk about ‘the building

industry,' It is the conventional collection of

organizations, design and engineering firms,

banking institutions, general contractors and

subcontractors, regulatory bodies, etc. that

build buildings for specific clients: an agency

of the Government, a private client, or sometimes a wealthy family. The client sets the requirements, decides on where they’re going to

locate, usually purchase their own land, and

then enter into a process in which a design is

created for them that’s eventually put out to

competitive bids. The ‘building industry’

listed here is the only industry in which competitive bidding occurs. It is practically the

only industry of building where there will be a

major change if there is a technological

breakthrough. It’s the one building industry

where bidding can reflect market conditions

as a result of changes in prices.

None of the industries listed above really

have much competitive bidding. Sometimes

market competition works in the housing industry, but only over a long period of time.

The major impact of the housing industry, as

we’ve mentioned already this morning, is what

it cost to buy the land, and what is the mortgage rate that they have to pay? We used to

speculate we could practically build a house

for nothing, and it wouldn’t change the price

which people would pay for housing, because

the market price for housing was determined

by a whole lot of factors other than the technology of building.

● The fifth industry, the remodeling industry, is

one we sometimes forget. Of the $250 billion

that represents our 10 percent of the gross national product, is included almost $50 billion

in this remodeling industry. This probably

does not include rehabilitation of existing

buildings in the sense that an architect and

contractor might do it, nor does it include rehabilitation of the kind that homebuilders do.

It means the remodeling industry that sells

things from aluminum storm sash, to screen

doors, to new store fronts for small businesses;

that is financed by short-term financing rather

than increases in mortgages. It is not regulated by building codes, by and large. For a

long time, it could be characterized by the

blue suede shoe type of salesman,

• The sixth industry, and the one that OTA

chose not to cover in this workshop, is what I

call the heavy construction industries. These

industries build highways, dams and facilities.

Their clients are primarily public agencies

and utilities.

I can make a couple of statements about

these six industries that are useful even though

there are exceptions to everything I’m about to

say. First, the fourth industry in my list, ‘the

building industry,’ is the only place in which

technological change has a dramatic and immediate impact.

Secondly, if one tries to make a definition of

an industry which is a collection of people who

represent a common interest because they supply a common concern, these definitions hold up

pretty well. One of the ways that is very visible

if you work in Washington, is by seeing who is

it that lobbies. And the people who lobby for

each of these groups don’t really concern themselves by and large with the other groups, People who are lobbyists for the housing industry

are not, by and large, concerned about the commercial developers or the remodeling industry

or the heavy construction industry, and vice

versa.

Also, another way to look at it is who supports the R&D and where is the R&D done. A

few universities do research that crosses over

these industries, but if you look at the individual in the university who is doing research,

their research is oriented towards one of these

industries, as contrasted to the industry across

the board. I also think that there are very seldom movements of companies, of skilled labor,

or even of financial mechanisms across these industries.

The prospect, therefore, is that when we talk

about the impact of technological change, as

OTA will be doing, and what that means to the
146 Reflections on the Presentations

building industries — and we provide advice to

policy makers like Congress about what can be

done about looking at the impact of technology

on the building industries, that if we are being

as clear as we can be about it, that we mean

there are these six industries and not one industry.

B. Evolution vs. Revolution

We must also be clear about the nature of the

changes now underway in the building industry.

We’re in an industry in which the character of

change has been evolutionary and not revolutionary, and that’s likely going to continue to be

the case. A lot of my fellow executive directors

here in the National Academy of Sciences are

responsible for areas that have only been around

for ten years or fifteen years. Some, like chemistry or physics, have been around for over one

hundred years. But we’ve been building buildings for over five thousand years. Over that five

thousand years inventions and innovations have

been introduced, primarily by trial and error.

When we have an industry like the electronics industry, the mean time between surprises is

zero. One expects a new surprise to come out of

that technology practically every day, but it was

born in a period of time when the kind of race

that it’s running is equivalent to the 100-yard

dash. The pace of change in the building industry is more appropriate for running in a 26-mile

marathon. You don’t use the same techniques in

the 26-mile marathon that you use in the 100-

yard dash. The construction industry has

learned what works, what doesn’t work, and

how to bring about change very slowly.

Well, what is a revolution? And if we were to

try to describe to Congress whether there are

revolutionary changes possible, conceivable, or

likely to happen in this industry, what would we

mean by ‘revolution’ as contrasted to ‘evolution?’ There’s a simple definition of ‘revolution’

for this purpose. By ‘revolution’ one would

mean the rapid displacement of an existing set

of ideas or skills or institutions. That is, somebody would be out of business who’s now in

business, or some idea would be out of vogue

that’s now in vogue, and a new idea, a new set

of skills or new set of institutions that were considerably different, not just slightly changed,

would have come into existence. Technology

has created many ‘revolutions.’ Consider the

field of medicine. Practically no child has measles today. Diphtheria has been eliminated in

the world, not just in the United States. Literally in the world there are zero cases of diphtheria at this point. Technology is transforming the

office. 1 learned to type when I was in the service. But the word processor is so much more

convenient than the typewriter that the typewriter is practically useless to me today. I

wouldn’t want to use a typewriter, as such, even

though there are new typewriters still coming

out on the market.

Tower cranes are one of the technological

changes that were introduced into the building

industry that displaced old concepts, and I

gather the tower crane may, in turn, be displaced in the near future.

Well, what kinds of things have we talked

about in this workshop that have the quality of

revolutions? I thought I would concentrate on

those since evolution in this business, after five

thousand, is relatively easy to deal with. Maybe

some of us believe there needs to be some

ameliorating consequences on the part of Congress, but by and large, I’m impressed after

twenty-five years in Washington that in our society, we do adapt to evolutionary changes.

We’re less good at, less clear about how to deal

with revolutions.

So what kind of revolutions might be coming

out of what we’ve talked about, ‘revolutions’

meaning the displacement of an idea that’s in

present currency, the displacement of a set of

skills or the displacement of a set of institutions?

The clearest, most easily understood, example is what I would sum up in the word

‘telematics’ the combination of electronics that

combines communications, computers, electronic controls, et cetera.

In Harry’s report on the first day, and Alton

Bradford’s as well, most of us are made aware

of the fact that telematics is dramatically going

to change the building process. This is conceivably revolutionary in the sense that there will

be displacement of skills in professional firms as

a result of this telematic change.
John P. Eberhard 147

We also heard from the team of Reisman,

Clevenger and Patri an example of telematics

being incorporated in the products which we

design and make, namely the ‘intelligent’ building, It’s not quite as clear whether that’s going

to be revolutionary, except that there does appear in the case of the ‘smart’ building a good

possibility that there will be a displacement of

the concept of office buildings that are not

‘smart’ buildings, and that therefore, our inventory of office buildings, particularly the ones

that are in the open market, will represent a

new opportunity for upgrading performance if

they’re going to stay competitive.

It’s interesting that telematics introduced into

buildings, is the first revolutionary change in

the fabric of our cities in almost one hundred

years. One hundred years ago we had a very

dramatic set of changes which included:

1 ) The invention of the steel process (the Bessemer process) and therefore the ability to separate the structural part of buildings from the

walls. This made it possible for the first time in

history to build buildings that were taller than

four or five stories. The steel skeleton began to

emerge as a technological possibility a little

over one hundred years ago.

2) Associated with that was the necessary invention of the elevator, because while people

will walk up five or six stories, the possibility of

them walking up more than that is not very

likely.

3) Another invention was the invention of a

whole set of things that made indoor plumbing

possible. You just have to imagine a sixty-story

office building in downtown Manhattan that

had all outdoor privies to imagine the land

problems that that would impose if we didn’t

have indoor plumbing.

4) And then a discovery really, the discovery

of electricity, and the application of electricity

to indoor illumination so that spaces inside of

buildings could be used without daylight.

5) Then a set of inventions that made communications possible, primarily the telephone.

The ten thousand people who work in the Empire State Building could not continue to function in our society if they had to deliver

physical messages between each other on pieces

of paper and were not able to talk on the telephone.

6) Then the invention of the internal combustion engine and its incorporation in the automobile. This dramatically changed the urban

setting.

7) The invention of the set of devices called

furnaces that changed the nature of how we

heat space from essentially what was a wood

burning or coal burning fireplace, with enormous logistics problems, to the centralization of

that heat producing device in something called

a basement.

Now, that set of inventions has two interesting characteristics to it. Every one of them were

reduced to patentable positions in the United

States between 1880 and 1892, and since 1892,

there has not been another single invention that

dramatically changed the performance characteristics of buildings.

However, we may be, with the ‘smart’ building, and with telematics, in the middle of the

first dramatic change in the performance

characteristics of buildings since 1892.

Next, in this workshop, we discussed the

question of whether or not there are any surprises coming in the manufactured housing

business. That is, is the process of making buildings off the site likely to produce some dramatic changes over the next few years? I think

what Don Carlson and Eric said clearly indicates that if it’s not going to come out of the

United States. But the subject which we have

not talked about is that it might come from foreign competition. Japanese or the Swedes or

some place else might develop a truly capital-intensive process.

It we examine how much capital equipment

is invested in a typical U.S. prefabrication plant

per worker, I think it’s still probably not much

more than $2,000. The average farmer in Pennsylvania spends $75,000 on his equipment to do

his farming on an everyday kind of farm. So

we’re very far from being a capital-intensive industry at this point, even with our manufacturing processes.

I’ve not heard, but it would be interesting to

hear, what Japan’s equipment investment is.

David Claridge and John Millhone talked to
148 Reflections on the Presentations

us about energy conservation. The message

there for Congress seems to be there’s no surprises coming unless, and that’s a very hard

thing to predict, unless we have another world

crisis of some kind, in which we have our sup

ply of fossil fuels dramatically curtailed. Then

we might have to do something more dramatic

than what we did in 1973.

An interesting example from the energy conservation area seems to be a byproduct of technological changes in energy uses. Even such

evolutionary changes, sometimes can be very

dramatic. The dramatic change that’s coming

out of energy conservation is the decline in the

business of the heavy building industry. The

people who build power plants are the ones who

are getting revolutionary changes introduced

into their activities as the result of energy conservation, because electric utilities don’t need

the kinds of capacity they thought they were

going to need fifteen years ago. Just yesterday,

for example, TVA announced the cancellation

of another set of nuclear power plants. Those

big projects that big civil engineering companies

did are disappearing, and the result is very interesting. Most of them are looking to other

parts of the world for business, and they tell me

that there are really no giant projects that they

see in great abundance going to come out in

any part of the world. So that means that the

Swedes, the Koreans, the Japanese, the French,

the Italians, all of the big companies in most

parts of the world are looking every place else in

the world for business that’s going to represent

a new opportunity for them. That may be the

most revolutionary thing for the construction industry to come out of energy conservation.

Dick Tucker talked this morning about what

seemed to me more of an emphasis on problems

than opportunities. The interesting notion that

he represents is the constant concern than I’ve

heard for at least thirty years now in this industry about we need more support for R&D. I

don’t think there’s any shortage of capital for

R&D anywhere, whether it’s Federal funds or

private funds. What we’re short of is good

ideas. When somebody like Dick and his colleagues put together a good set of ideas, they

can get the money to support their work.

I have never heard of somebody who had a

good idea that didn’t get funded. I’ve heard lots

of people with half-baked ideas, and I’ve heard

lots of people who have complained that if they

only got some money they would have good

ideas, but by and large, the money is available

if there are good ideas.

Wendel was the biggest surprise for me. He

represents true revolution. He represents that

breed of cats like those who are out there

changing the world in Silicon Valley in California, They didn’t ask anybody if it’s all right to

come out with a new set of ideas. They went

ahead and produced a new set of ideas. When I

taught architecture 1 had students who had

ideas like his but he’s actually getting them

built. Wendel is not only revolutionary because

he has some good ideas, but because he’s getting them built.

Al Dietz said that there are no revolutions

coming about for materials. However, the use of

waste materials, the new applications of materials like composites and laminates may change

some of the processes. We can say to Congress

apparently we don’t see any surprises coming

out of the materials field, including out of

NASA.

Chuck Thornton talked about the actual cost

of the building as being only one-third of the

cost to the owner. I have a hunch, that the financial community will soon be entering some

revolutionary changes. Banking and financial

institutions are not going to go out of business.

We need money to make money, but they’ve

gotten so greedy and so big in my lifetime that

the central part of every city in the United

States, and in most of the world, is dominated

by buildings built by financial institutions.

When I was a boy we were building churches,

schools, hospitals, suburban homes. Banks were

little places, in which if you didn’t do well in

high school you went to work. All of my children’s friends who did well in business administration or economics, or almost any other

subject in college, go to work for banks in New

York City and make astronomical salaries. The

credit card companies are tying to charge me

19.8 percent on short-term credit when we’re

complaining about what, 14.5 percent mortgage

rates in housing? Something is wrong somewhere. Somebody is making too much money.
James G. Gross 149

Every time in history when somebody is getting

too much of the pie for themselves, some kind

of revolutionary change occurs. New institutions come into the business, and those new institutions create a different way of doing things.

I think that one-third cost now of buildings that

does into money might, in fact, precipitate not

only a change in time, but a change in the way

money enters into this system.

Then finally the lesson that comes from

NASA, that Stan talked about, is that the largest single invention in our lifetime has been the

invention of how to invent. For the first time in

history we can purposefully go about inventing

whatever the mind of man can conceive. That’s

never been true in history before.

How we go about invention is the key. What

we did not do when we decided to go to the

moon was to hire an industrial designer, an

aeronautical engineer, and interior decorator

and a couple of other professionals and say,

“Design us a spacecraft that we’re going to send

out for bids.” Why didn’t we? Because the big

secret of invention of invention was how to use

ignorance as a resource. How to find out what

it is we don’t know. That’s what the space program has taught us; how to systematically go

about finding out what we don’t know. Work on

a collection of things that you don’t know until

you do know something, and you can release a

new set of discoveries.

I think we’re in the building field with

telematics now at a stage where we may produce a revolution of that kind, a new set of

characters who will say, let’s systematically go

about not just new product development, but

new concept development by using ignorance as

a resource.

John P. Eberhard is Executive Director of the Advisory

Board on the Built Environment at the National Academy of Sciences
150 Reflections on the Presentations

James G. Gross

1 will address the needs and opportunities of

the building community as I see them. I will

briefly address opportunities as they relate to

computation and automation, education of professionals, productivity, and building research.

Suggested will be a model for change that

might be given some consideration.

On the subject of automation and advanced

computation, it’s amply evident to all of us that

this technology is coming on like gang busters.

The work that Wendel is doing in the design

and manufacturing of space frames is extremely advanced. But we must be impressed

with the fact that it’s still fragmented. The

hardware, the software, and the languages still

don’t interface. Wendel showed that he had to

bring the architect to his office in order to communicate. The day will come when he, through

his computers, will be able to communicate directly with any of his clients, and his clients

with their clients and consultants. Expert systems have not yet received much attention, but

the opportunities for expert systems will put

new demands on architects, engineers, and researchers.

We continue in a construction process that

regenerates the same information over and over

again in spite of the fact that we have this wonderful new capability in front of us. Basic information about the building is generated at the

predesign or programming stage. It’s regenerated at the design stage, not any by the architect, but by each of the involved consulting

engineers.

For example, an architect will develop the

necessary information to design a wall system.

The mechanical engineer again will develop

some of the same information to calculate heat

gain and heat loss through the walls. The structural engineer will need some of the same information to determine the loads on the

foundations. Then the contractors bid the job.

They take off much of the information from the

plans and put it into their computers to prepare

bids. The building regulator, who has to check

the plans for compliance with the building

codes, does it again; maybe not to the same

depth, but he needs to look at the plans that relate to safety characteristics such as fire resistance. Over and over again, the same

information is regenerated, each time increasing

the chance for errors and decreasing overall productivity.

The contractor, after receiving the award, has

to take the information off the plans and specifications in detail for ordering the materials and

scheduling the work. The fabricator extracts the

same information to develop shop drawings.

Yet, when the project has been completed, the

previously developed information is not available to the owner and occupants who need it to

operate and maintain the building. Nor is it

available to those who want to rehabilitate or

demolish the building,

We need to develop the necessary interface

standards which will allow the various proprietary hardware and software systems to talk to

each other. We should develop these standards,

using the voluntary standards organizations now

in place. This will permit all affected parties to

have an input and a part in the development of

the standards.

Research needs to be conducted to obtain

knowledge on the application of artificial intelligence to the development of expert systems for

construction. In the area of education for professionals, we have been told — it was said over

and over again during these past two days —

that tomorrow we’re going to have to work differently, architects, engineers, and constructors

will need to work as a team. Nevertheless, today we still see much fragmentation at the university level. For example, mechanical

engineers usually don’t learn much about building technology as part of their education. They

may be in the same building, but they don’t

talk to the civil engineers, and the civil engineers don’t talk to the architects even though

they do most of the structural design. Electrical

engineers usually don’t show much interest in

buildings, and the architects are off in their corner, concerned primarily with drawing and the

aesthetic aspects, not the technical issues of

buildings. Many builders and contractors are

educated in schools where business management is the matter of primary concern.

If we look at the recent past, you will see

that architects have enjoyed relatively less of
James G. Gross

the design fees paid for building design and

construction; and their proportion is decreasing.

Engineers, on the other hand, because they are

applying more technology, have experienced an

increase in their part of the pie. The time has

come when many firms refer to themselves not

as AE firms, but as EA firms, which was almost unheard of ten years ago. This indicates

an increased emphasis on technology applied to

building design practice. I think it’s time that

we look at the opportunities to educate this

team as a whole. There are big potential payoffs

by studying and improving the way we educate

young professionals so they can better work together as team members.

The next item I want to touch on is productivity. I was interested in what Dick Tucker

said about increasing productivity at the job

site, but I want to address the subject from a

different angle. We were told yesterday that the

environment in the ‘smart’ office building can

increase productivity 24.9 percent. That is a

very impressive number. Michael Clevenger

made a convincing argument that we can increase productivity by that amount. Let’s look

at the meaning of increasing the occupants’ productivity, not just the typing pool’s production

of typed pages; but let’s see what it really

means in dollars.

Several years ago we provided technical support to the General Services Administration for

their building systems program during which

we looked at the life-cycle costs of a building

from a productivity viewpoint. When we looked

at the life-cycle costs over an office building

life, the numbers came out something like this.

The initial cost to build an office building is in

the order of two percent of the total cost to

build, operate, and product in it over a life time.

Approximately 6 percent of the total cost is for

operation and maintenance, and 92 percent is to

pay the people who work in the building.

So let’s extrapolate from these numbers and

look at what an increase in worker productivity

can mean in the total scheme of things. Even if

you add an additional 25 percent to the initial

cost of the building, in order to increase the

productivity of the people in the building by

even 10 percent (e.g., reduce labor costs by 10

percent). You would get a return of 18 times

the investment. I know of no other investment

as financially attractive today; and if you

achieve the suggested 25 percent increase in

productivity, you get a return 46 times its cost

in present worth dollars. Those kinds of investment opportunities are unheard of. We ought to

be looking at the impact that a more productive

built environment could have on the construction industry, the opportunities for architects,

engineers, building materials and equipment

suppliers, developers, and investors. We need to

look at this opportunity for all types of buildings, from office buildings to the factory floor.

What would increased productivity mean in

educational facilities, on one hand, and retailing, on the other hand?

I support a thorough study, including behavioral research, to understand the impact of

acoustics, lighting, thermal comfort, air quality,

space relationships and aesthetics in buildings

as those qualities affect productivity. Such research may be a major opportunity for the construction community. Also a hard look at the

influence of the built environment on productivity would be a great opportunity for the country

to improve productivity.

A number of papers here argue the need for

more research. Research money will usually be

available when the financial opportunity justifies the investment, and when the results of that

research accrue to the people who make the investment, Yes, then there is money available.

But there is not money readily available to

conduct research in which the benefits accrue

to society as a whole. There is need for more research support as part of education for building

professionals. Other countries are spending a lot

more money on building research in proportion

to their populations. I don’t think they have better ideas than we. Foreign governments are

spending money directly on generic research

which I mentioned before, and they are providing incentives for proprietary interests to encourage research.

The Japanese private entrepreneur has a lot

more incentive to do research than does U.S.

Homes. We heard yesterday that US. Homes

does no research. Individual Japanese construction companies have building research capabilities comparable to what we have at the

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152 Reflections on the Presentations

National Bureau of Sandards. Some individual

Japanese companies have two hundred professionals doing research. When that knowledge

hits our shores we’re going to feel it more than

we do now. Canada is spending a lot more than

the U. S., and they are doing a lot more to transfer research results into practice. Also, research

has a tremendous influence on quality education. If we’re considering improving the education of our professionals, we need to consider

supporting research in the same universities.

Mr. Kelly mentioned three large industries in

his introductory remarks. The three largest industries in this country are health care, food

production, and construction; each approaching

10 percent of the GNP The health care industry, through the National Institute of Health,

has an annual appropriation from Congress over

$4 billion; and yesterday we heard about the

wonders that are taking place in that area.

Look at agriculture. That is the one industry

where nobody in the world approaches the U.S.

in productivity and efficiency. The US. population is fed efficiently and effectively with the

best quality and widest variety in the world. We

export more agricultural products than any

other product area. The Department of Agriculture spends about $1 billion a year on research.

The construction industry is about the same

size as these other two sectors, and spends in direct appropriation at a national level of $8 to $9

million. In addition, NSF supports some building related research in universities; HUD

spends a little money for building research; but

there are not sufficient monies spent on generic

building research in the United States.

Let’s look at these numbers. Health care is

supported at a level of over $4 billion at NIH,

and food production at approximately $1 billion

at the Department of Agriculture. Construction

represents only one-half of one percent of what

is spent for research at NIH. I am not suggesting building research should be at the same

level, but I am suggesting that there are excellent building research opportunities that need

support.

There are other needs. There is the need to

effectively implement findings to improve building practices. John Millhone talked to that

point yesterday when he said we know a lot

about energy conservation and its use, but we

need to transfer that knowledge to the local

level so that it’s used in rehabilitation.

It would improve our competitive position

worldwide if we would develop more new construction technology and transfer it into practice. Let’s examine our country’s successful

model, agriculture, which I mentioned just a

minute ago. The Department of Agriculture has

a program of national research. There is support for research at the land grant universities

in every state. There are related educational

programs, and there are technology transfer

specialists, called county agents, around the

country that move the results of that research

into place.

I think we ought to look at the USDA model

to see if it might apply to research and education for construction that would offer enormous

benefits to the Nation.

I have a couple of additional points I’d like

to made. One is that we haven’t heard anything

about indoor air quality. IAQ is something

that’s going to get a great deal of attention during the next few years. We don’t know what

quality of air is required for good health and

productivity. We don’t know how to accurately

measure the quality of air that we breath. So

these are two tremendous problems; the first,

being health related, I hope the medical profession will tackle. The second is a measurement

problem which we in the construction industry

can tackle with sufficient support for research.

The other area I want to mention is diagnostics. Diagnostics is needed for two purposes:

one, for acceptance and quality assurance of

the products and systems we build, and the second is for analysis of our existing buildings, particularly in preparation for rehabilitation. We

will see a great deal of good work in the area of

diagnostics during the next few years. There’s

much interest in the research now underway.

I agree with the observations made by others

that rehabilitation has been a major growth

area and will continue. In order to effectively

and efficiently rehabilitate our existing building

stock, it’s essential that we understand the performance capabilities of that stock. As Eric

Dluhosch suggested, it is inefficient and wasteful to gut a building and rebuild the whole in-
James G. Gross 153

side, What we need to do is to have technologies. Quality control for new construcnondestructive evaluation, diagnostics, so that tion and analysis for rehabilitation will require

we can determine what the performance major growth in the development of diagnostic

characteristics of that building are so we can capability.

maximize the use of our existing resources as ——

we rehabilitate them. There are many opportu- James G. Gross is Deputy Director of the Center for

Building Technology at the National Bureau of Stan- nities in the areas of thermography and ultra- dards.

sonics, for example, as well as other NDE