In Roen, France, in the twelfth century, blind people placed Notre Dame’s limestone facades from atop giant wooden wheels because they wouldn’t get vertigo from the height.
In 1883 New York, the Brooklyn Bridge was built by lifting steel, granite, limestone, cement and wrought iron with wooden cranes.
In 2004, Taipei 101 was forged with reinforced concrete and micro-alloyed steel, decorated with a glass curtain wall and secured by a 660-ton steel pendulum to absorb massive shocks from typhoons, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
From mud bricks to smart concrete, construction methods have continually evolved in response to new challenges. Today’s drivers—financial uncertainty, AI, workforce shortages, safety and sustainability—are accelerating that evolution faster than ever.
FINANCIAL: SUPPLY-AND-DEMAND SHAKE UP
The first quarter of the twenty-first century has seen its share of shake-ups: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, global tariffs, a housing crisis, a workforce shortage…Each instance forced all industries to pivot. Construction particularly felt the blows in its workforce, its supply chain and its backlog—and it is still nursing some of the wounds. The construction industry may never return to what it was pre-pandemic, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“The building materials industry is a massive supply-and-demand model,” says Mark Gilham, vice president of global advisory at supply-chain and finance software company Enable. “Generally, the demand is more consistent than the supply.” Steel tariffs might not have hurt single-family residential too badly because not a lot of steel goes into a residential home, but they hugely impacted commercial construction. Conversely, tariffs on lumber impact residential construction more severely. “So the tariffs have been disruptive,” says Gilham, and, because the construction industry tends to work as a cost-plus industry, “whatever the landed cost is at the beginning of the supply chain will just ripple right through to the people who are buying these homes and buildings.”
But the demand is there. “The market has no choice but to accept these inflationary measures,” he continues—which may feel like a problem, especially for estimators, owners, manufacturers and materials suppliers. But Gilham states that while the inflationary state of today’s construction materials market feels like a big problem, at least the market is moving. “If the demand wasn’t there,” he says, “there’d be a real problem.”
Gilham even finds a silver lining regarding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the building materials industry.
“Obviously the pandemic itself was a terrible thing to happen,” he prefaces, “but the silver lining that I took away from it was the whole world shut down, yet we carried on.” Prior to joining Enable in 2022, Gilham was working in the building materials industry.
“Nobody knew what to expect. Were our customers going to continue paying us? Were our suppliers going to continue supplying us? How long would this last? There were so many unknowns, but it was a true testament because I feel that the construction industry is the backbone of most major economies that it recovered incredibly quickly in terms of getting back to productivity.”
When it comes to tailoring a building materials procurement strategy proactively to brace for the effects of tariffs or a global pandemic, some things are impossible to prepare for—which is also not necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s a balancing act,” says Gilham. “You want to be prepared, but you don’t want to be over prepared and overspend.” The critical action? Understanding the supply chain. “If you’re a manufacturer,” Gilham posits, “how much material actually goes into your products? How much steel are you actually using? What are the component parts? Where are they all coming from? Understanding your supply chain, understanding the products you’re dealing with can tell you what your tariff exposure would be in a given scenario.”
In the case of the Liberation Day tariffs, some exporters decided to end exporting to the U.S. altogether. Gilham says it’s not so much about being proactive as it is about having the skills to be agile—which is where the cost-plus philosophy proves beneficial. Gilham asserts the construction industry is in a better position than he sees of some other industries because it generally operates this way, “which is not always recommended as the best value extraction pricing mechanism,” he says, “but it’s the simplest. Nobody’s trying to do value-based calculations, especially during times of upheaval. Understanding how you price is really important in this industry.”
TECHNOLOGY: PIE IN THE SKY
With the help of modern technology, building methods have evolved to require minimal human intervention. In Gilham’s experience, much of today’s investment in construction technology is poured into building methodologies, like design-build or prefabrication. But in Philip Jacklin’s experience, investment in construction technology has shown the brightest in the manufacturing sector. As the continuing education program manager at Diversified Fall Protection, Jacklin has spent his career monitoring—and influencing—safety trends in construction. One positive trend he has witnessed is building methods becoming safer, faster and generally better over time—largely thanks, at least recently, to the help of artificial intelligence.
“On the manufacturing side,” he says, “AI has been able to make manufacturers more efficient in what they’re doing by streamlining some of their production processes.” Today, it seems fairly common practice for companies to not only use AI-driven software in both the office and the field, but to create their own platforms tailored specifically to their needs.
“I would hope that AI can do things like analyze data given to it from videos or photos from a jobsite and help foremen and safety managers identify the safest—or least safe—scenarios: if they’re using the right equipment, if their equipment is connected. Going through data this detailed just takes a human being a little bit longer to process and discover,” Jacklin says. “Then we have to cross reference, but hopefully these machines will be able to do it pretty instantly.”
SAFETY: FALLING UP
Despite current and imminent advancements in building method safety thanks to AI, falls in construction are still the number one killer of its workforce.
“It’s a multibillion-dollar industry,” says Jacklin, “and yet the numbers are increasing every year.” Jacklin does note a brief dip in those numbers around 2020, but says, “that was primarily due to the fact people couldn’t work for about two months during COVID.”
If people aren’t working, they aren’t getting injured. One would also imagine if people are using safety equipment—like fall protection—they aren’t getting injured. However, data shows the opposite is actually true: A 2021 study by the Center for Construction Research and Training found that almost 60% of fatal falls occurred while the worker was using fall protection equipment. “It’s not just about putting glasses on a person and saying, ‘All right, be careful,’” says Jacklin. “This is about giving them equipment and then making sure they use it properly.”
“We have all these great solutions in our catalog,” he continues, “but, in my experience, the contractor would say, ‘I can’t add that here. It’s not part of the design.’ So, it goes back to, if it had been thought of earlier, so much more could be done.”
Safety in building methods and materials can also be tied back to finance. Many companies have found that if they invest in something like a safety helmet ANSI/ISEA Z.89.1 Type II, they spend a lot less on workers’ compensation and litigation. In many of his industry discussions, Jacklin references OSHA’s General Duty clause, which states that employers have a general duty to keep their workers safe of injury and fatality, even if there is not a specific regulation or a standard in place. “What we’ve seen make the most progress,” he says, “is talking about liability and moral obligation. You can’t morally ask someone to do a job if you haven’t thought of a way for them to do it safely.”
SUSTAINABILITY: BUILDING IS BETTER
Despite a documented rise in fatal falls in construction, there is documentation for improved safety standards in construction materials and building methods. Of course, that change is driven by an industry consensus of workforce safety, but a growing consensus for sustainability efforts is also in play.
Karim Muri, vice president of marketing services and strategy development for Kingspan, says, “If you think back to the early 2000s, it was all about energy efficiency. What are the materials that help drive energy efficiency to lower operational carbon? Over the years, we’ve seen energy efficiency become the base requirement. The industry has evolved to now demanding not just operational carbon reductions, but embodied carbon reductions. Those material changes have been made in response to changes in building code, and building codes have been changed in response to dealing with climate change.”
There has been a visible evolution from energy efficiency trends to general decarbonization standards across the U.S., with some jurisdictions now requiring maximum levels of embodied carbon in their building code and others implementing deadlines for net-zero carbon emissions. But deadlines mean nothing if they are not met.
Brent Trenga, Kingspan’s North American director of sustainability, says, “Over the last eight years, it seemed like everybody was rushing out, screaming from the mountains that they had a sustainability commitment and they’ve set targets and they’re doing all these things, but then lots of corporate commitments and alignment have fallen off. Now there’s been a number of corporations that have come back. I think we’re at a critical juncture, so it will be interesting to see how companies are behaving in the next few years.”
Despite a pendulum of corporate sustainability commitment, industry consensus for sustainable changes in building materials and methods exists, exhibited by major players like the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration in Downtown D.C., constructed by HITT and Hickock Cole. This campus is ranked as LEED Platinum, using low-carbon concrete to cut emissions by 20% of a regular build; a 48,000-gallon water cistern to capture rainwater for reuse; and locally and ethically sourced recycled ash wood. But how do these standards get implemented legally and logistically? It all goes back to supply and demand—with a little bit of R&D mixed in.
“You need the carrot and the stick,” says Muri. “Customer demands are powerful market drivers. And from a contractor’s point of view, that could be the customer demand from the building owner or the customer demand from the architect’s specification. But at the same time, there is a role for regulation to push hard as well.”
To follow this demand, Kingspan has a dedicated, in-house research and development department committed to driving its own role in the evolution of building materials and methods. Many new building materials are born out of challenges, and necessity is the father of invention.
“We find opportunities out of challenges,” says Trenga. “We’re trying to solve foam waste, for example. How do we recycle or reuse foam? That problem has generated a new product: We are able to embed recycled foam into a slurry mix that turns into a concrete material. So those challenges have turned into opportunities for new products.”
Lately, customer demand for new methods and materials has come in the form of data center needs—how to build more data centers and build them faster.
Trenga says, “There’s a lot of complexity to how a building like a data center comes together. It’s also incredible because the timeline is astronomically fast.” Once again, solutions for supply are found in the demand. When manufacturers and installers communicate, products can be modularized and reconfigured for efficiency and productivity. “That can change how viable other materials are,” says Trenga. “Methods like tilt-up and precast concrete don’t really lend themselves to the data-center type of schedule where other products—like insulated metal panels—do, combined with modifications of installation method. Suddenly you have a solution that was never there five years ago.”
For those companies without dedicated R&D, it is not impossible to be a player in the evolution of building methods and materials. Trenga says, “Even big companies don’t have unlimited resources. They’re constrained by multiple budgets and people and all manner of things, where smaller companies can be more readily adaptable. They can reinvent products and redirect who they are as a business. I’ve seen how a lot of startup companies go from an idea and a small-scale operation to solving something that has massive market pull. If they can find a couple of key strategic partners, suddenly they can really scale at a commercial level. That’s really exciting to see.”
Keeping up with trends or even setting them is one thing. Embracing and influencing widespread adoption is another. Trenga harkens back to the idea of gaining industry consensus—whether that be for business/financial, technological, sustainability or safety standards.
“You’ve got the early adopters and then the laggers in the market,” he says. “Any cycle is like that. I’m a big advocate for capitalism for good. This is a free market. The biggest leaders in the world are for-profit businesses and they can also be good stewards in the environment. And through their actions and through how they demonstrate their behavior, they can signal markets in a very positive way so that last 10-20% of the market gets pulled along.”
Construction materials and methods have always evolved—from lead and asbestos to PVC; fossil fuels to solar panels; mud bricks to smart concrete; fiberglass to wool insulation; single-item manufacturing to assembly lines and 3D printing; precast to tilt-up concrete; onsite assembly to offsite prefabrication—and the pace and precision at which they are evolving into the latter twenty-first century is both undeniable and undeniably positive.
“Construction has always been ripe for disruption,” says Trenga. “Once you find the disruption, you find opportunity. Take it, lean into it and leverage it.”
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