Because of its complexity, the construction industry cannot produce cost-effective high performance buildings under the industrial paradigm.
The American construction industry continues to produce complex buildings even as it struggles against industrial-style structures and practices. The industrial paradigm , which revolutionized production and delivery, and which served the nation well through the 1950's, has deteriorated in its maturity: has fallen into specialized "silos," or compartmentalization, and has reached the limitations of linear, analytic logic. This industrial drive for specialization, combined with the complexity of construction, broke the industry down into a "multi-dimensional fragmentation":
Discipline dimension — fragmentation of site, architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and functional — and their sub-disciplines
Process dimension — fragmentation of design, management and coordination, building production, and material production
Building life-cycle dimension — fragmentation of building process and building product
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Project team "life-cycle" dimension — discontinuous project teams (Team for Project A ≠ Team for Project B ≠ Team for Project C)
Despite being fragmented in these four dimensions, there are promising movements within the industry; especially in the areas of Building Information Modeling (BIM) , Integrated Project Delivery , and Sustainability . However, even these movements' potential will never be fully realized within the industrial paradigm. Because multi-dimensional fragmentation necessarily frustrates efforts to innovate and optimize, the industry remains marked by a lack of innovation and declining productivity, and the potential technology promised by emerging movements remains only a potential. Given growing concern over the environment and energy dependence, and given construction's significance for both, innovation and optimization are needed in construction now more than ever. Construction is huge — four times the size of the automotive industry — and is intimately connected with the environment and energy in at least three ways: (1) the construction process (energy consumption and environmental impact caused by construction), (2) the construction product (the operating, producing and consuming building), and (3) the infrastructure that construction creates to produce and distribute energy. For such an industry, the stakes are increasingly high and change is increasingly necessary.
But the industry is remains unable to break free of the fragmentation. This is because it is unable to break free from commodity-based design and procurement. There have been attempts to award work on a qualification or performance basis at the first tier in many cases, and at lower tiers on an increasing basis. There is however, little empirical evidence that the desired value improvement have been achieved, so claims as such remain largely conjecture. The underlying problem is that no one has figured out how to create standards and measures of performance beyond the point-of-production (i.e. the discipline or trade level).
There is clearly a way for the industry to transition out of the industrial paradigm. This is because there is a way to establish and compute systemic standards and measures. For an overview of the solution, the Performance Paradigm is the next step, or to jump right into the entire plan, you may proceed to the Performance Building paper.