Back to the Future: The Return of the Master Architect

Imagine a conversation between Architect and Customer around 5,000 years ago.

The architect is named Imhotep. In addition to being an architect, Imhotep is also a poet, engineer, magician, scribe, astronomer, astrologer and physician. The customer is the Pharaoh. And the project is the Pyramid of Djoser.

Pharaoh: “I want a world class masterpiece, the tallest structure on earth, and something the world can marvel at for millennia.”

“What is the budget and schedule for this masterpiece?” Imhotep asks.

Pharaoh: “The budget is the treasury of Egypt and the schedule is my lifetime.”

 “Are you thinking a PPP contract, or IPD? What are your tendering rules? Do you have any consultants or subcontractors you favor for the work?” Imhotep asks.

Ok, that last part didn’t happen. But my point is this: if he had been forced to use this kind of 2018 design and construction thinking, would Imhotep have been able to create a masterpiece that’s lasted over 4,600 years?

Today, the idea of a multi-skilled designer who controls cost, schedule, and all technical aspects of a project seems to be beyond the construction industry.

But why is this so?

We have computational, materials science, machinery, robotics and many other tools and systems that should make our work easier—not harder—than it was thousands of years ago. But today we seem to believe that buildings are much more complicated than even the pyramids themselves. The industry is now incredibly fragmented and communications go through so many hands on a project that a single source of truth is often hard to establish.

Of course, the construction industry is beginning to recognize this and is making many diverse efforts to resolve it in ways you might expect – public-private partnerships, design-led design-build approaches, Virtual Design and Construction, Building Smart, and many other initiatives that attempt to bring diverse parties into a unified place.

But if you want to be there then why would you start here ?

Disrupting construction in this way takes us back to the future, but it also requires rethinking the construction process from start to finish. We must start to ask – why are practices and processes the way they are?

For example, the traditional design process for the last 100 or more years has been to follow stages labelled concept, schematic, detailed design, construction documents, shop drawings and construction administration.

Why?

Because the waterfall process for which it was designed needs moments of coordination to check that cost and schedule are still aligned with the customers’ expectations. This process was also created so the whole building can be parsed into pieces for the purpose of buying it through multiple suppliers and subcontractors mostly on a one-off building basis. In order to ensure the pieces actually fit together, the building is then virtually reconstructed in a clash detection environment. The parts and pieces are then inconceivably shipped to sit out in all weathers and constructed with increasingly unskilled labor.

Yes, this is the construction process in 2018. No wonder cost and schedule are hard to control.

Traditional design-bid-build often involves iterative design processes that are like a series of ever decreasing circles until a lack of time and/or fee determine that the process has reached a conclusion. After that, many design decisions are made by subcontractor’s which further impact time, cost, and quality long after the architect has stopped documenting the design. At that point, the murky world of change orders and RFI’s arrives during which the building is completed.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that Imhotep created a geometrically complex, massively-scaled project without the aid of Building Information Modelling. He had no bidding process, no sub-consultants, and no web-based communication tools. He used his vision, allied to a mass production process, to create an enduring structure that we still marvel at today.

Today we can provide a technological platform to again enable a single mind to conceive, design, manufacture, and assemble a building in which the final cost and schedule are known at the point of the design decision.

Wouldn’t that put us ahead of Imhotep for the first time in history? What if that system allowed options to be explored to understand the value of repetition and the gains from increased productivity of reduced labor on the sites to deliver the project significantly under the price that would come from conventional construction?

Katerra was born only 3 years ago but has started closer to the place Imhotep finished than the construction industry of 2018 that we seek to disrupt.

Our process at Katerra is very different. In our approach, the architect designs with cost and schedule known from the outset which allows design opportunities to be explored and optimized from an end-to-end cost perspective. Designs are continuously coordinated and the value of repetition and automated digital fabrication explored. The result is that the outcome is known long before work begins on site and creative energy is not wasted on administrative functions.

A process driven by technology, manufacturing, and integrated systems results in a design process that is agile and certain from the very beginning. The creativity of the architect is connected to certainty. Buildings are assembled with speed and certainty. The Architect gets what was imagined. The era of the Master Architect becomes real again.

Imhotep would be proud.

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So, how can Katerra help you?

·      We can aggregate the material needs for your single building project to our global supply chain and save you money.

·      Redesign building components to be mass produced to reduce time and cost by shifting work upstream into the controlled factory environment. 

·      Engineer for manufacturing and turn the project from a construction site into a place of assembly of components.

At what stage of design is Katerra most effective?

·      The earlier the better – the most value we can add comes through our end-to-end process of design, manufacturing, and assembly of entire building products.

·      During site assessment, we are developing methods for radically streamlining feasibility.

·      Pre-DD we can often use our design for manufacturing approach to enable mass production techniques to save money and time.

What building types can Katerra help with?

·      Anything with repeatable components or assemblies – particularly valuable for multifamily, student housing, hospitality, commercial or retail projects.

·      Structures utilizing pre-engineered components such as mass timber.

·      Projects in which labor shortages or site restrictions are impacting cost to such a degree that developers are seeking innovative solutions in order to lower costs.