From the outside it looks like a clean, modern social housing block. You can tell it's new: there are 84 shiny solar panels on the roof and the fresh paint on the walls has barely dried. But what really matters is how this building with 56 apartments in Barcelona and a kindergarten on the ground floor was designed and built.
“Our software is our superpower,” says Lucas Carné, co-founder of 011h, a construction technology company, as he describes how his company has developed digital tools to help architects design buildings like this. “We use a lot of prefabricated parts,” he adds. “This reduces the need for local workers.”
Prefabricated construction involves prefabricated building parts or components that are assembled on site. It's far from a new concept, but 011h has tried to make it much easier for architects to adopt this approach. The company offers architectural software plugins that contain libraries full of these pre-built components. This makes designing a building similar to playing with digital Lego.
Improving productivity to solve the housing shortage
To date, 011h has worked with architectural and construction firms on several Spanish apartment blocks of various designs, completing approximately one such block per year. The company now plans to expand to several projects per year, totaling around 200 apartments per year. The company has so far raised more than 35 million euros and employs 90 people.
The
The latest rumors from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise old founder Boris and some questionable AI artwork. It's free in your inbox every week. Register now!
This push to streamline design and construction is urgently needed, says Carné. Like in many European countries The demand for housing in Spain currently exceeds the supply. However, the picture is different across the continent a lack of housingAnd a shortage of construction workersare common topics. Material costs also skyrocketed in the worst years of the pandemic. Now various European startups are developing a number of ideas to mitigate these problems.
“Our goal is to improve productivity,” says Carné. “Probably the biggest problem in this industry is stagnating productivity.”
Build with digital Lego
Traditionally, construction has been a completely disconnected business. Roughly speaking, an architect creates a design and then hands it over to a contractor, who separately works out how to actually implement that design. 011h takes a different point of view. “We carry out a design and build process together with the suppliers and solutions we will use,” says Carné.
All information about who supplies which components, what costs are incurred and what the CO2 footprint looks like is recorded in the company's software from the start. His team focuses on using sustainable materials – such as responsibly sourced wood instead of concrete, as the latter contains high levels of carbon.
The buildings of 011h have achieved CO2 emissions of less than 400 kg CO22 Equivalent per square meter – significantly better than the current average. In addition, according to Carné, construction time is reduced by around 30% compared to average.
Construction conservatism can hinder the adoption of new technologies
Revolutionizing construction with digital technology is promising but difficult to implement, says Sam O'Gorman of McKinsey's Real Estate Practice. He notes that there is often resistance to new approaches in the construction sector. Furthermore, given the high capital expenditure, there is significant risk if a project goes wrong: “A single failure could cost the company.”
However, if companies entering this space have a good track record – perhaps through significant self-funding, at least initially – then they could convince potential partners that they are worthy of collaboration or investment, O'Gorman adds.
Another company that says technology can help us build homes smarter and faster is AUAR (Automated Architecture) in the UK. Gilles Retsin, co-founder and CTO, says his company's approach is to equip construction companies with “microfactories” – boxes with large robotic arms inside. These arms work tirelessly to produce modular building units. Imagine a wooden floor or wall panel measuring approximately 4 x 3 meters, thick enough to be filled with insulation, and which can be assembled with other panels to form a building.
From Job
“The robot will essentially grab raw materials, cut them and place them on an assembly table where it will nail them together,” explains Retsin. “Then they are brought to the site by people using a crane.” AUAR employs 17 people and has raised £2.6 million.
The company is currently targeting the European and US markets, both of which are suffering from labor shortages in the construction sector. “We just built a two-story building in Belgium,” says Retsin. In this case, the microfactory robot took about three days to produce the building block units, and human workers took another three days to connect these units together and complete the main structure of the building.
AUAR originally made its microfactory robots available at a cost of £250,000 each, but Retsin says the company is moving to a hardware-as-a-service model, where builders pay a lower fee to deliver the microfactory to site can. You then pay a further small fee per square meter of building area produced.
Although the company has not yet scaled, Retsin emphasizes the enormous potential of keeping the robot arms running continuously – and perhaps using many of them in parallel. “The capacity of a robot is 200 homes per year if you let it run eight hours a day,” he says, adding that the next step for the company is to launch a 30-home project in the U.S. next year to take attack.
Robo Brickie
Finally, bricklaying remains a crucial skill required for housing construction in Europe in 2024, as brick-based construction continues to be valued by European homebuyers. However, there are also bricklayers among the workers currently very scarce. Amsterdam-based Monumental has an alternative.
“They tell me: 'I want to build a facade for a house, it's X square meters,'” says Salar al Khafaji, founder and CEO. “I’ll give you a price and do it for you – but I’ll do it with robots.”
The company, which has raised $25 million so far and employs 32 people, offers bots that can lay mortar and bricks in a careful order to automatically build a wall.
The process involves three individual robots, each performing a separate task: either delivering a brick, applying a lump of mortar or placing a brick. However, grouting – i.e. the clean completion of the visible mortar joints between the bricks – still has to be done manually.
In videos like the one above, the bricklaying work carried out by the robots appears to be rather slow, but al Khafaji emphasizes that since the machine is able to continue working continuously and without interruptions, it can roughly keep up with that of the average human bricklayer Rate of 500 bricks laid per day.
Keeping people informed is still urgently needed
Automating specific activities like this that can be integrated into traditional construction processes could help these technologies be adopted more quickly, suggests O'Gorman. However, he points out that human supervision and completion of tasks are still required. It can take a long time for robot builders to work all night with little or no supervision.
Nevertheless, Monumental's robots have already helped, among other things, to build a canal retaining wall in Amsterdam and a one-story villa. Demand is encouraging, says al Khafaji, indicating that he has orders for several new terraced houses on the books in the coming months. The company is also exploring the potential of its use more environmentally friendly bricksas normal clay bricks contain a high amount of embodied carbon.
While Monumental's masonry machines cannot yet lay vertical bricks or build arches, they can create curved corners and also lay bricks artistic patterns.
“I find that really exciting,” says al Khafaji, “that brings beauty back into our built environment.”
Comments are closed.