Humans have been constructing since the beginning of their days. Teams of designers and tradespeople collaborate and bring their own set of skills together to try to turn nothing into something, or old into new. Throughout that process, plans are created, interpreted, instilled and inevitably, revised. No matter how much foresight, time, effort or care is taken to design, there are mistakes.
Systems won’t work as intended, drawings are misunderstood, existing elements are missed during the initial design, or pieces are installed incorrectly. Expensive rework needs to be done, schedules are delayed, stress and anxiety grow, and the project loses productivity. Couple that with the construction workforce shortage that topped half a million workers last month (abc.org), and it’s obvious that something needs to be done to drastically increase productivity, remove the data gap that construction has faced since its existence, and eliminate the pitfalls that are always talked about on site as being “just the way construction always is.”
Construction can and will be different!
In this blog series, we will be exploring topics that Geauga Mechanical has been participating in to help move our construction projects forward in technology and understanding. The days of beat-up tape measures, dusty chalk lines and following outdated paper prints on site are soon to be replaced with the whir of drones as they lay bricks, 3D-printers silently extruding parts of the building and the crackle of robots welding steel beams with laser-guided precision while following a model in augmented reality. None of this would be possible without our VDC (virtual design and construction) team and the daily BIM (building information modeling) work that they perform.
Stay tuned as we dig into the technology that we’re using to reshape our projects, as well as what we think will soon be utilized by us and our trade partners across the country as we navigate the AI explosion that is on the horizon!
