World Building Congress 2013

During my thirty-hour rail trip from Brisbane to Cairns, I came across more roof solar panels than any other local Australian feature. I would now prefer to associate this country first and foremost with its vibrant social atmosphere, good wine, good food, sunny days, and welcoming, friendly, and easygoing people rather than kangaroos and koalas! Yet, those exotic ibises with their iconic long curved beaks freely wandering around the city were reminders of the unique flora and fauna of the continent.  

The alluring city of Brisbane hosted this year’s World Building Congress. The event was somehow overshadowed and influenced by recent natural disasters around the world, namely floods in Queensland and New York City and earthquakes as well as the financial crisis. The most concurrent topics among the works presented were resilience, sustainability, safety and security, offsite manufacturing, integrated design and planning, and smart building knowledge management. More or less similar topics have been introduced and discussed in the first series of CIB Research Roadmaps. 

The major theme of the congress, construction and society, was brought up, emphasized, and clarified in concrete terms by the Minister for Housing and Public Works of the Queensland Government, Tim Mander. The eventual goal is to add value to buildings through – among all - innovation, PPP constructs, and whole-life cost analysis, according to him. 

The first keynote speaker, Prof. Martin Fischer from Stanford University communicated their most recent findings on how to simulate numerous possibilities of a construction project before actual construction. The answer to the question “why we come up short in projects?”, in his opinion, can be traced back to organization and prediction. Here comes a list on some other topics Professor Fischer touched on in his talk: the importance of the stage following the design phase and prior to construction, clear-cut clarification of the goals of the project, elimination of uncertainties, on-budget, on-schedule, and quality projects, staff working for the project rather than for the company, continual evaluation and redefinition of the process, manufacturing building elements based on digital models, deployment of laser scanning for post-construction determination of discrepancies, implementing Multidisciplinary Design Optimization method (MDO) for balancing carbon footprint against life cycle costs, using Space Constraint Method (SCM) for evaluating efficiency of use of construction space, and integrating subcontractors in the design team. 

During the afternoon keynote speech of the first day of the congress, Peter Verwer, head of the Property Council of Australia expressed an enthusiastic appraisal of the cities and their pioneering role in our modern societies. Urbanized and connected living areas nurture productivity, he asserted. Urbanization, IT, and globalization are three major contemporary driving forces that should be benefited for creating flourishing and evolving cities, he believed. Nonetheless, bringing the language of technology and that of business closer to each other is an essential requirement for more efficient urban services. 

Later on, during the panel discussion of the first day of the congress, a number of global challenges ahead of the building industry were put forward: 

• Still 30% of construction work is done onsite (on average). 
• Building Information Modeling is quite often comprehended as a technology that customers are reluctant to use. 
• Basic requirements and strategic guidelines for creating economic shelters and modernized settlements seem to diverge extensively. 
• Costs of building are increasing because of the higher costs of the newer technologies. This poses a serious threat to small construction firms. In the Netherlands, for example, 60% of the construction firms of today will vanish away by 2050 
• Costs of operating and maintaining public welfare equipment will double by 2040 due to increasing costs of technologies. 
• Green buildings should be replaced by resilient buildings. 

During the second day’s panel discussion, Carol Le Gall, chief executive director of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) notified contemporary challenges in the building industry with regard to optimization of production and consumption of energy, carbon, water, and waste. She continued with a comprehensive report on CSTB’s project for analyzing real-time indoor air quality; LUM’AIR. Prof. Peter Barrett from the University of Salford concluded the session with an inspiring talk to remind a neglected matter of course: what the overall role of the entire building industry is. Research activities in the field, in his opinion, may follow educational, economic, social, or environmental concerns; but they should eventually have a holistic impact and relate to how the buildings affect people. At the same time as agents in the FM sector neglect the impacts of their possessions on the lives of the mankind and simply regard their profession as a business similar to any other profitable affair, our built environment either contributes to health hazards such as Alzheimer, anxiety, and vision problems, or nurtures healthy and thriving societies. Finally, Lyn Beazley shed some light on recent technological achievements realized in the far western Australian port of Perth and Curtain University. The initiative for transforming non-visible parts of the light into energy by using photovoltaic cells and nanotechnology is an outstanding example of their cutting-edge research projects. 

The afternoon keynote speaker of the second day, Brian Krause from Turner BIM gave a ravishing lecture on their most recent developments in the field of BIM technology seasoned with demonstrations of a software solution for BIM-enabled facility management and operations developed at the University of Columbia. He touched on a variety of topics and issues in the field of use of IT for construction including authoring BIM execution plans, evaluation of total cost of ownership (TCO), turning SketchUp into an object-based modeling tool by means of plug-ins, pushing legislative boundaries forward by submitting a 3D safety model to NYC municipality, optimizing clash detection functions of existing applications, use of barcodes for more automated maintenance routines, and promoting lean BIM processes. 

The third day’s keynote speakers, Dr. Wim Bakens and Dr. Shyam Sunder depicted, among all, the CIB’s general research roadmap. Dr. Wim Bakens clarified the necessity of a research roadmap as a glossary of agreed-upon definitions and an overall conceptual model. Contemporary construction research institutes, namely CSIRO, VTT, TNO, bre, and CSTB need to be able to demonstrate that their concerns are relevant, they have access to all members of the community, and are capable of efficient and effective knowledge exchange and  collaboration. Implementation of research in practice is also momentous which calls for a closer contact with the society, industry, and government. He then noticed the fact that there is a tipping point for the percentage of investment in construction out of GNP to secure a positive contribution to development of the society. This could be termed as the built environment’s caring capacity; a concept that is closely intertwined with decline of building and the optimal peak of new construction. He articulated his proposed remedy as, among all, implementing different types of business models for overcoming the declining market, more efficient risk management, and future-oriented, sustainable, resilient, affordable, and adaptive buildings... I will probably provide a summary of other contributions in a separate post later on. 

David Mitchell, Christoph Merschbrock, Eilif Hjelseth, and me got together in a bar in Brisbane's South Bank before the last night congress dinner