Herb Auerbach: On Automation in Architecture

Herb Auerbach is a real-estate and development consultant, and author of “Placemakers” 
 
I read with interest Alex Bozikovic’s article in the January 27 issue of the Globe abd Mail – “Build2.0: The Future of Architecture rests in the hands of robots” – and felt that your readers should understand the major advantages of and a few of the limits and challenges facing prefabrication not mentioned in this article.
Although pre-fabrication has not yet proven to be more cost effective than stick-built or on-site construction, its major advantageous are:

• providing steady employment
• elimination of waste
• quality of materials and quality control of workmanship
• speed of erection at the site.

Drawing an analogy with the car industry is misleading and misses the point that the car manufacturers don’t have to build the roads that cars drive on.

The major problem with prefabricating houses is that although it is possible in a factory  to produce a house like an automobile at the rate of one every 20 minutes, you can’t put it on a site at the rate of one every 20 minutes, and in order to do so you need a lot of land and a huge guaranteed volume.
Although it is possible, as the article points out, to prefabricate many components for highrise construction, it still remains difficult, if not impossible, to prefabricate total units.  This is thanks to the length of time and uncertainty in securing entitlements (zoning and building permits), jurisdictional union problems and unions fighting the ability to have fewer workers on a job site, and the reluctance of building authorities to accept electrical and plumbing work installed in factories and delivered inaccessible to a building inspector on the site.
Prefabrication may not be the future of architecture as the title of the article suggests, but may in fact be the end of architecture, since the architect in realizing a building made of prefabricated parts is limited by the constraints of the factory and the nature of the components it is able to produce.
Having said all this, prefabrication has its role to play in the manufacture of components and producing large scale government-sponsored low-cost housing, and projects such as military or emergency housing for humanitarian purposes.