Cardus Edição 47, 01-01-2019

Diáspora (3)

5 years ago, I was working in Australia on a particular project when I came to know that one of the architects working with us was going to retire in a few months, after being 40 years working in the industry. I wished the architect, 'all the best', and asked him, what in his opinion, was the major change in our industry in the last 40 years. "Everything is so much faster now," he replied immediately. He was talking about how we share information in modern times.

While thinking about his words I remembered one episode in my life, 10 years before, when I randomly sent my CV over the internet for the first time. One company got really upset with the 1-megabyte file I attached to the email. A file so large that they could not download emails for a while. They were not very happy back then, and yet, these days, similar stories are an unusual occurrence. Information moves much faster now and without constraints.

In fact, information started to move so fast in Australia, that in the last 4 to 5 years, I started seeing project documentation to be coordinated through Outlook. Communication was carried out by email and phone manly. There was a lesser and lesser need of meeting people in loco. On my last project I have seen the architect only once. We talked through phone and email only.

Recently, I left Australia and moved to Sweden. I was not very excited about this move, but as I discovered so many times in my life, starting anew is usually a chance to build something new too; and it can be something better than it was before.

In Sweden AF Gruppen gave me a job; and somehow if things were moving faster in Australia, in Sweden i came to to understand how the industry started to move as a whole.

With the AF Group I have for the first time in my career worked on a project that has achieved BIM to level 3. I had never seen so much information in a 3D model before. There has been lots of talk about BIM, but I had never experienced anything at this level before.

Construction programming, something that in my experience never evolved beyond gantt bars, suddenly became an entirely different exercise. Thanks to BIM, we are now able to visualize the construction process, step by step, in a fashion that i had never seen before. And this is just the beginning. Because as the industry moves to a data driven industry it won’t take long before automation becomes a reality; and the more i explore the brave new world we are about to enter, the more i realized that pictures like the one below, which i found in the AF Gruppen intranet, are not anymore pictures from a distant future.

I guess working alongside robots in the future, although potentially scary, is at the same time a great opportunity to build more advanced structures. I always thought it was going to be difficult to see change in the construction industry because it is so labour intense; but i can no longer think like that. Much will change, and it is already under way.

Helder Cardeira