Recent events
that show where we are at.
Autodesk
The Autodesk
BUILD Space opened in Boston in October, to explore all kinds of new materials
and processes. It will host teams from academia, industry and practice doing
work in digital fabrication, design robotics and industrialized construction. Autodesk
will provide, at no cost, work space and access to advanced training and
equipment, and Autodesk personnel.
BUILD Space has
more than 60 pieces of equipment including six industrial robots, and 11
dedicated workshops for wood, metal fabrication, composites, 3D printing, laser
cutting, and large format CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router and waterjet.
It works with all the materials used in building and construction processes: steel,
wood, stone, concrete, ceramics, glass, and composites like carbon fiber. The
space also includes a 5-ton bridge crane for large fabrication projects and
moving equipment and materials between floors. All this equipment allows integration
between software and the fabrication tools.
Prefabrication
Hickory Group
built Australia’s tallest prefabricated building two floors a week, twice the
industry standard. The 44-storey apartment tower in Melbourne was constructed
entirely from prefabricated concrete and steel elements made offsite at Hickory’s
Brooklyn factory. Prefabricated building components included bathroom pods,
precast concrete slabs and pre-attached windows. These were trucked to site and
craned into place. Once in place, shotcreting was used to provide structural
stability between modules.
The project
featured at the prefabAUS 2016 conference, where these figures were reported:
share of Australian market 3 per cent, in the UK 45 per cent of health industry
development and in Sweden 80 per cent of the residential market is prefab.
Smart Cities
In September we
had Smart Cities Week in Washington, which started with the City of New York
and over 20 US partner cities announcing guidelines for the Internet of Things,
a framework “to help government and our partners responsibly deploy connected
devices and IoT technologies in a coordinated and consistent manner”. The
guidelines’ subtitle is “Better. Faster. More Equitable”.
Support from
the Obama Administration is through the White House Smart Cities Initiative,
launched at last year’s event with US$170 million had an additional $80m committed
for 2017. New programs include low income communities, partnerships for
innovation, smart and connected health research, and big data regional
innovation hubs. This is particularly relevant to Australia as the Turnbull Government
is expected to release a smart cities policy in 2016.
