NEW TECHNOLOGIES
How will they redefine the architectural,
engineering and construction community?
By Mark Buckshon
Florida Construction News staff writer
Is the U.S. design and construction industry about to
experience a radical, transformative and critical techno-
logical revolution?
The answer, according to some industry leaders, is
“yes” - as the industry’s inefficiencies and intermediary-
loaded framework experiences stress as owners press
for greater efficiencies and disruptive integrated organi-
zations are changing the meanings of modular design-
build to much more comprehensive and wide-scale
applications. To learn more about where the industry is heading, I
accepted a media invitation to attend the TECH+ Con-
ference in New York earlier this year, sponsored by the
The Architect’s Newspaper.
During the day-long event, several speakers outlined
critical issues, including collaboration/BIM, sustainability
and visualization, as a variety of industry technology
businesses demonstrated their products and services.
Several speakers observed that the AEC industry is
near the bottom of the bell curve in technological adap-
tation, only slightly better than architecture.
Perhaps the biggest “wow” moment occurred for me
when Chris Meyer, Boston-based general contractor
Suffolk’s chief information officer, displayed a graph
showing the sudden and dramatic market decline for
newspaper advertising in the last decade. We’ve pub-
lished stories about Suffolk’s multi-city Smart Lab con-
4 – SUMMER 2018 — Florida Construction News
cept, but I didn’t connect the dots until his speech that
Meyer had previously been the Boston Globe’s pub-
lisher. Meyer displayed a graph that showed that, while the
newspaper industry was well aware of the Internet’s
rise and developed different models to cope with the
change, it could not stop the steep and dramatic crash
that started about the turn of the millennium, as Google
and Facebook grabbed most of the advertising market.
In fact, newspaper advertising revenue has declined by
about four-fifths in the past decade, so advertising rev-
enues are now even lower than they were in the 1950s.
Newspaper digital sales have made the slightest gain;
but the data is clear – the conventional newspaper in-
dustry has been pushed over the cliff, and in just a few
years. Meyer suggested that AEC, like the newspaper busi-
ness, is an “intermediary” industry – that is, most practi-
tioners are serving others in the value chain rather than
end users - and he suggested this could create a situa-
tion where there will be major disruptions as new tech-