GoKawiilConstruction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Unsurprisingly, there’s long been interest in automating the construction process to reduce the amount of labor required, and therefore the cost of housing. The earliest attempt at automating construction I’m aware of dates to 1853, with a plastering machine invented by Isaac Hussey, and since then there have been numerous other attempts.
Hussey’s plastering machine, via Scientific American, February 5, 1853.
I wanted to get a better sense of what the arc of construction automation looks like over time: what things had been tried when? What worked, and what fell by the wayside? To do this, I used AI to trawl through thousands of old issues of digitized construction trade journals going back to the 19th century, looking for any example of a construction task being automated.
My main takeaway is that successful construction automation basically falls into two categories. One is construction-related tasks that can be done off-site in a factory: this includes things like steel fabrication, precast concrete, window and door manufacturing, and so on. The other category is on-site tasks that are, or can be made to be, extremely factory-like: they can be done by a machine moving along a simple path, doing some repetitive motion over and over again. Historically, almost anything outside these two categories hasn’t succeeded.
Method
I started by downloading every back issue of Architectural Forum (950 issues) and House & Home (370 issues) on USModernist, and every back issue of Engineering News-Record (4,300+ issues) available on archive.org. These are trade journals that cover various aspects of the construction industry, including construction practices and methods, and cover the period from the mid-19th century up to the early 1980s. I then had Claude (Opus 5 Max) search through these issues and flag any instance of some construction task being automated. In addition to this, I also had Claude do a more general web search for examples of construction automation, which included things like looking through the archives of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC).
The purpose of this wasn’t for data analysis: I wasn’t counting the number of cases by year or by category, or anything like that. This was purely an existence survey so I could see what sorts of things had been tried and were promising enough that they made it into a trade journal.
As usual with a task like this, the results will be a function of what definitions you choose to operationalize the terms in your prompt. By “automation,” I mean something like “a machine does some substantial portion of a task without requiring human direction.” So this is distinct from “mechanization” or “industrialization,” where a machine is used to reduce the labor required to do some task, but that machine might still require continuous direction or direct operation from a human operator. So something like a power tool or a crane wouldn’t count as automation, because in both cases each individual movement/action of the machine is orchestrated by the human as the work is being done. A bricklaying machine that automatically placed individual bricks without a human operator directing it brick by brick, on the other hand, would count as automation.
Like most definitions, this one gets fuzzy around the edges. In practice most automated systems require some degree of human oversight while they’re running, and whether that oversight counts as “directing individual movements” can be something of a judgment call. So I’d consider a road-paving machine that automatically lays down asphalt “automation,” even with a human driver monitoring the machine continuously. But something like a ride-on concrete finishing machine seems much more borderline, since that seems to require a lot more human direction on a second-by-second basis.
Factory methods
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