Recent Technological Advancements In The Construction Industry

In the last 24 months there have been enormous transformations within the AEC industry and arguably across most industries, many of which have influenced and shaped business decisions made during the pandemic, you could say the pandemic has only sought to accelerate some of the transformation we had started to see. The biggest and most notable is in the area of communication and connectivity, staying connected and providing employees with the tools and platforms they need to collaborate, innovate and stay productive has been at the forefront for all companies. We’ve seen great technological advancements in this area with many new tools coming online or old ones getting a face lift which has enabled most employees to seamlessly transition into working from home with great ease. Whilst workers have been able to adapt to this new world with ease, we know that workers are still craving the human interaction that can’t be replaced virtually. In our recent UK Workplace Survey, we found that 67 percent of employees want to return to the office for between 1-4 days a week and would prefer a hybrid of home, work, and office work.

Detailed in Gensler’s UK Workplace Survey 2020

To aid the ‘return to work ‘strategy for ourselves and our clients, Gensler has leveraged generative algorithms to plan office occupancy, helping companies use data to bring people back to the office safely.

One of those tools is called ReRun, a system that works by importing a company’s existing floor plans, then overlaying social distancing bubbles that space out employees in ways that align with government health and safety requirements. The algorithm can be adjusted and updated as requirements change.

Gensler has taken the approach to provide our Designers with our data-driven design tools and proprietary computational products gBlox and gFloorz that allow our world-class designers to bring deep design heritage and domain expertise powered by market-specific metrics to balance form, function and business insights during the design journey with our valued clients.

Our compute-powered design solutions provide an unparalleled client experience for agile and predictable decision making. gBlox leverages client [and designer] defined metrics that are adjustable in real-time throughout the design journey, allowing our clients to study trade-offs that balance form finding with business insights on capital assets.

In 2025, each connected person will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds.” —BABAK BEHESHTI, NEW YORK INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, IN TECHREPUBLIC

49%

IN 2025, NEARLY HALF OF THE WORLD’S STORED DATA WILL RESIDE IN PUBLIC CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS.

10X

IDC PREDICTS THAT THE WORLD’S DATA WILL GROW TENFOLD, FROM 33 ZETTABYTES (ZB) IN 2018 TO 175 ZB BY 2025.

30%

BY 2025, NEARLY ONETHIRD OF THE GLOBAL DATASPHERE WILL BE REAL-TIME, UP FROM 15% IN 2017.

—IDC, DATA AGE 2025

AEC is proactively looking to find optimisations and efficiencies to improve our KPIs and financial margins and technology is a major factor in that discussion. We can learn from other sectors that have embraced Technology in the past decade, most notably the financial sector. There are many trends utilising AI artificial intelligence and algorithms to generate and evaluate thousands of design alternatives in order to find more profitable and sustainable solutions, arguably saving conceptual design time and resources. However, it is early stages and there is a lot to develop, I am cautious yet intrigued as to what the market has to offer to help the industry leaders shape best practices.

The principal goals for generative methodologies are for quick generation of design variants, optionarying efficiency, program, usage and exploration of the design space. Informed and extended means of interaction for user influence on the generation process, we believe that the developed parametric workflow for an automatic generation of design options can allow for a more efficient investigation of the design, mitigating procedural forms of modeling that can then be benchmarked by a direct connection of the design outputs, resilience analysis and simulations thus showing the performances of the solutions immediately.

Shifting from our European HQ to our homes with minimal to no disruption is testimony to our 1one-irm-firm vision for Design and Technology, adapting and being at the forefront of technology advancements.

Last year alone we created 1.2 billion square feet of space. That’s why we are committed to designing with an unwavering focus on Human Experience as we work to shape the future of cities. We are living through the greatest period of urbanisation in history. For the first time, more people live in urban centres than don’t. By 2050, more than 70 percent of the earth’s population will live in cities. Cities are also responsible for 80 percent of global GDP—they are engines of creativity and economic innovation for everything from technology to healthcare.

“ There are many trends utilising AI artificial intelligence and algorithms to generate and evaluate thousands of design alternatives in order to find more profitable and sustainable solutions. “

The world is changing. Global population shifts mean that over half of the world’s people now live in cities—a total of 4.2 billion people. By 2030, there will be 43 megacities on the planet with populations of at least 10 million people in each. These concentrations of people are already introducing tough new challenges.

Because Gensler impacts millions of lives in cities around the world, we have an opportunity to address climate change and create a resilient future like few others can. Buildings generate nearly 40 perecnt of annual global greenhouse gas emissions and 50 percent of the world’s energy usage. With an additional 2.48 trillion square feet of new building stock anticipated by 2060, we have an urgent responsibility to lead our industry in meeting and exceeding net zero carbon targets.

40%OF GLOBAL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS ARE GENERATED EACH YEAR BY BUILDINGS. — ARCHITECTURE 2030

Taking on Tough Global Challenges with these competencies, Gensler is uniquely positioned to tackle the toughest challenges facing cities. We are impacting Climate Change by reducing the carbon footprint of our buildings, using data to inform our design decisions, enabling us to take critical design directions in the early stages to reduce the impact to the environment.

A prominent trend I can share is our clients are increasingly engaged in resilience, carbon footprint and exploring repurposing of their assets, we call this REPOSITIONING Architecture.

500M SQ. FTOF OFFICE SPACE IS IN NEED OF SIGNIFICANT REPOSITIONING IN THE U.S. ALONE

—URBAN LAND INSTITUTE

20%SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS HAVE 20% FASTER LEASE-UP RATES

—ERNST & YOUNG

To stand out in a fiercely competitive workplace or office building market, building owners are looking to increase asset value by curating amenities that optimise the human experience and enhance the communities they’re in. It’s not necessarily about adding space or levelling aging buildings—it’s about revitalising and revisioning buildings that are viable. Given the ample volume of existing building stock, thus reducing any project’s carbon footprint by repurposing existing buildings, we can recycle a large inventory of older, under-utilised buildings in growing urban centres. This offers a huge opportunity to transform these properties into greener sustainable Architecture. The Urban Land Institute estimates there is more than 500 million square feet of office space in need of significant repositioning in the U.S. alone.