Rethinking Human Buildings

The massive structures erected by Crichton's termites offer a thought-provoking contrast to buildings erected by modern societies.

A typical building erected in Barnett's Integrating Core is made of hundreds to thousands of different materials brought together by dozens of trades using hundreds of different skills.

A termite hive, every bit as sophisticated in both design and execution, is produced by one kind of craftsman with no oversight employing one skill and using moistened pellets of soil as a building material.

Typically, innovators seeking to automate construction attack the problem piecemeal. The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC)...

http://www.iaarc.org

...typifies this approach.

When I began my intellectual quest for automated construction in 1969, however, I rejected this approach. I believed from the onset that for construction to be successfully automated the whole process of building had to be rethought and rebuilt. It was insufficient to build a robot that could lay bricks or build drywalls.

I was not alone in thinking these sorts of thoughts at that time. There were others who inspired me in this line of thought. To the best of my knowledge, however, I am the only one who has stayed with it to the present time.