3 ms·
Why bother improving construction labor productivity when it's the legal fighting, paperwork, and unwanted-but-necessary shmoozing that grossly dominates projec
by zbrozek 5y ago
Why bother improving construction labor productivity when it's the legal fighting, paperwork, and unwanted-but-necessary shmoozing that grossly dominates project time? It wouldn't surprise me if it dominates cost soon too.
Edit:
Also in a lot of cases I'm not actually sure how you would do it even if you wanted to. There's some minor improvements with better tools (on several size scales) over the graph's time, but also increased expectations of quality, inspection, and safety. Maybe factory-produced prefab construction would help, but so far it hasn't been a resounding success.
- redis_mlc 5y agoPartly it's because there's several trades involved that work independently (non-parallelizable). What we're also seeing in SF is a regression in building skills. The Salesforce building had cracked steel beams, despite inspection by two outside companies, and the Millennium Tower has cracked and sunk 2 feet since construction, and may need to be demolished, despite consultants saying beforehand that piles to bedrock were needed in that area like every other tall structure in SF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisco) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...