Emily Badger talks to Phil Bernstein, a lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture, about the future of construction. Bernstein wants to reform an industry that's changed little over the last 50 years:
Today, small tripod-mounted lasers are coming online that can scan rooms and buildings in a single day and turn them into digital models. Such models can then be compared against digital plans for a building’s construction, replacing the old-fashioned method of eyeballing it. … Imagine scanning a construction site at the end of each day for such a precise diagnosis (and then paying the contractor for exactly the 8 percent of the project his firm had completed that day). "That’s a huge idea," Bernstein says.
Along the same lines, Robert Krulwich recently marveled at "flight assembled architecture," a structure built by flying robots:
As humans (none of them, I presume, in the construction trades) applauded and gaped, four helicopterish thingies swooped through the air, somehow avoiding each other, and one by one, settled on some "brick dispensers." Using small plungers they then plucked one brick at a time, carried each to the "building site" and slowly created a wall. It took a few days, but what emerged is a twisting, undulating tower, designed by Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler.
The Dish 