Keywords

1 Introduction

In the green and digital transition currently underway, the objectives and solutions that become necessary can radically interfere with existing methods for designing and producing buildings and portions of cities, seeing that they have to optimize the use of energy resources and the flows of materials, whose largest single consumer is the built environment.

The ongoing evolution of Industry 4.0 towards 5.0 has inevitably made the preservation and improvement of the existing ecosystem a key factor in the development of our constructed environment. As a result, processes and systems of production need to be radically restructured, orienting technological innovations of the digital era towards decarbonisation, while, at the same time, supporting new paradigms of social living.

The green and digital transition has brought to the fore objectives and solutions that radically interfere with existing methods for the planning, design and production of goods and services, as well as with the utilization of energy and material resources.

2 Building Factory Versus Construction Site

In the production of buildings, the “factory” and the “construction site” were one and the same thing up until the seventies of the last century. Fifty years later, in Tokyo, the dismantling of the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa is underway.Footnote 1 That iconic building was the result of the Japanese Metabolist utopia, whose goal was to arrive at the industrial, off-site production of housing modules designed to colonize buildings equipped with the most up-to-date technologies, in accordance with pre-established maintenance programs and planned life cycles.

The history of this building, and of built architecture in general, proceeded—fortunately, in my opinion—in other directions. These proved more respectful of the cultural context of cities, but also less aware of the need for production with more sustainable environmental impacts and—even more importantly—of the advantages of taking into consideration, in the design process, the optimal use of resources, as well as their eventual recycling at the end of their life cycles.

The fact is that, following the advent of prefabrication, the factory has gradually been separated from the construction site, as over the last 30 years an increasingly evolved industrial manufacturing sector has developed, to the point where it now accounts for much of the production value of buildings through the dry-assembly of factory-made products and components.

With the advent of robotization, it is easy to imagine that our sector’s production cycle will undergo further transformations. However, it should be emphasized that urban context and cultural heritage will always constitute an “unicum” whose social and cultural value cannot simply be reproduced. The “second machine age”—referred to as “Industry 5.0” in the programs of the European Commission—is unlikely to see machines prevail over the work of humans, though there will be substantial changes in methods of design and in interactions between man and his built environment.Footnote 2

This revolution will be significant enough to lead to an evolutionary change in the direction of a new collective imagination capable of allowing us to conceive—albeit unconsciously—of new and unpredictable scenarios for the development of interactions between man, machines and the built environment.

New technologies are designed to transform the system of habitation and the urban context by integrating ICT systems with technical spaces and components, as well as with artificial intelligence and the robotization of connected and collaborative construction processes, both in production facilities and at work sites.Footnote 3

These innovations can provide users and civil society with a better quality of life in indoor and urban environments while orienting scientific advances towards an effective culture of sustainability, reuse and safety.

For this reason, there is now an unavoidable need to balance the demand for innovative production systems able to guarantee the quality and cost-effectiveness of projects with the obligation to preserve the environmental heritage, which otherwise the planet risks tragically losing.

The topics of the session were specifically designed to maintain the connection between research on the industrialization of the construction sector and that on the development—sustainable, human-centric and resilient—of the environment to be built in the near future.

The technology session presented three short interviews on these topics, both to introduce the theme of the latest research and to outline a vision of the discipline that draws meaning from its origins, so as to proceed even further, towards a scenario which appears to lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing change.

In the first interview, Yotto Koga, a young software designer and researcher at the Autodesk Robotics Laboratory in San Francisco, discusses his research on “smart robot assembly systems”.Footnote 4

In the second interview, Professor Fabrizio Schiaffonati, one of our principal schoolmaster of discipline, is asked to lay out his vision of the relationship between the factory and the construction site, as well as the future role of design.Footnote 5

In the last interview, architect Sara Codarin, who earned her Ph.D. at the University of Ferrara with a thesis on “Building Robots”,Footnote 6 and is now an assistant professor at Lawrence Technology University, College of Architecture and Design, illustrates her research on robots in higher education.

Also invited to the Technology Session, in the role of discussant, was Francesco Leali, full professor at the Enzo Ferrari Department of Engineering of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Dean of the Master’s Program in Advanced Automotive Engineering and Coordinator of the Unimore Automotive Academy project.

The Master's Degree Programme in Advanced Automotive Electronic Engineering is an interuniversity, international course of study established as a collaborative initiative of the Universities of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia and the University of Parma, working together with the world's most prestigious automotive companies headquartered in Italy.

Professor Leali was invited because it is the automotive sector that has had the technological and organizational innovations of Industry 4.0 in place for the longest time. In this sector, advances in manufacturing have gone hand-in-hand with the revolution in approaches to planning and design.

The scenario that he outlined might appear far removed from the architectural culture and the urban reality that surrounds us, but I believe we will soon see a progressive hybridization of the various production contexts. Just think of the interactions already taking place between electric vehicles, the energy production systems of our buildings and the urban infrastructures of the most advanced cities. The resulting technological imagination appears much more immersive and exciting than might seem to be the case in these difficult times.Footnote 7

Five reports were presented during the session, illustrating the outlined scenario, together with proposals for innovations in teaching at faculties of architecture.

The combination of the interviews, our discussant speech and the session papers provided us with glimpses of what we can imagine for the future, highlighting certain aspects of particular relevance to the scientific community centred around themes of technological design in the contemporary era.

The coexistence of urban districts still in search of new environmental and social balances, together with the very latest technological research in construction, points to the possibility of progressing towards a society in which innovation not only benefits the shareholders who hold the keys, but also moves in the direction of more generally increasing the well-being of all stakeholders.

In the case of the drivers of technological innovation which we addressed in this session, they can be classified according to five lines of research and development that appear worthy of note, less because of how widespread they are than based on their ability to drive the innovative processes necessary for a vigorous recovery of production in the construction sector. They can be summarized in four key terms: key enabling technologies; new technological teaching of design; energy-conscious buildings; hybrid building technologies.

3 Enabling Technologies

The development of enabling technologiesFootnote 8 involves: “knowledge-intensive technologies associated with a high level of research and development, rapid innovation cycles, substantial investment costs and highly qualified jobs”. Such technologies are of systemic importance, because they feed the value of the production-system chain and have the capacity to innovate processes, products and services in all economic sectors of human activity. Furthermore, a product based on enabling technology uses advanced manufacturing technologies and increases the commercial and social value of a good or service.

With regard to our production sector, the most applicable enabling technologies concern:

  • additive manufacturing, off-site and on-site, for the production of components, parts of buildings and housing modules on demand;

  • augmented reality and artificial intelligence, to support the creative and design processes of buildings and cities;

  • horizontal and vertical integration of information, to create production and distribution process chains for industrialized building products, from the manufacturer to the designer and the user, to be integrated into construction and urban-development projects;

  • cloud and big data, to manage large amounts of data on open systems and on digital twins of buildings and urban districts;

  • robotics and wearable smart tools, to ensure better safety conditions for construction workers, in factories and on construction sites.

All these process innovations seem able to generate noteworthy progress in teaching and training systems for construction and urban design. In the near future, they will be significantly transformed to adapt to user requests. On the one hand, they must become increasingly self-explanatory, user-friendly and virtually immersive, so that students can learn with greater ease and interest, while, at the same time, they need to more effectively support the new skill requirements of the construction industry.

A third field of investigation, perhaps the most popular and thoroughly tested to date, concerns technological innovations in materials, products and systems to ensure the energy efficiency and the energy balances, of buildings. This theme requires a new vision of the interface between building components and plant systems. “Integrability” was a performance design concern of the 1980s, but it was a concept limited to aspects of the physical interfaces between building elements. Today, it is a question of giving content to the functional interface, along with the reciprocal benefits that such a dialogue can produce by ensuring a proper balance between the energy demanded and the energy produced.

The goal of zero-energy buildings can already be reached today, at least in new constructions, but soon we will see, with smart automotive construction and positive energy districts providing support as well, buildings make a notable contribution to lowering the overall demand for energy and reducing climate-altering emissions.Footnote 9

4 Evolution of Construction Technologies

This first encounter of ours offered only glimpses of a sector with enormous prospects for technological innovations in construction and built architecture. I am referring, in general, to the evolution of construction technologies, which for many years have shown only minor advances involving individual materials or fragmented processes, with adequate solutions yet to be offered to the new problems involving the resilience and sustainability of the built environment.

These have to do with the redesigning of natural materials in terms of their production and use, as well as the hybridization of various technological cycles: wood, steel, concrete, glass; but also bamboo, natural fibres and bio-plastics.Footnote 10 The integration of different component materials can determine which technical elements and portions of the construction best satisfy performance requirements, making appropriate use of materials in those instances where they are most efficient. An example is the rapid evolution of hybrid structural systems that combine wood, steel and concrete, and which already make it possible to design tall hybrid wooden buildings.Footnote 11 Also of interest is the opportunity for increasingly lighter buildings, with materials optimized for their specific uses, meaning that ever smaller quantities are needed. This particular innovation contributes to lowering the demand for non-renewable quarry materials while reinforcing the recycling and reuse chain and promoting heightened awareness of the fact that the goal of zero emissions is indeed possible.

The development of this field could produce a new chain of industrial services for companies based in our country, along with the possibility of exporting this experience to emerging countries that do not yet emit climate–changing gases at invasive levels, but may soon become involved in processes of social and economic progress, which could play a decisive role in establishing a renewed balance of the anthropized environment.

While these are the specialized topics that we wish to highlight, in more general terms, it can be said that the themes addressed in the five sessions proposed some elements pertinent to various sectors, in particular for the development of innovation in a sector that is now widely aware of the challenges ahead:

  • the opportunity, or rather the urgent need, to use all forms of innovation in instruments, processes and products to support the level of well-being of people while working towards a balanced readjustment of the built environment;

  • the massive availability of new solutions and equipment, but, at the same time, the difficulty our sector has in exploiting its potential, due to a scenario in the construction industry which is still underdeveloped compared to other sectors of civil society and the production apparatus;

  • with the mass media now spreading the message that everything proposed by the market is “sustainable” (sustainable cars, sustainable basil, sustainable holidays …), the need to develop methodologies and control systems which are able to support, under recognized scientific parameters, true sustainability—social, production-related, economic and environmental—of every production activity.

One factor has always hindered the development of a truly industrialized construction sector: the need to customize urban and construction products on the basis of information provided by the end user and the constraints of the existing building stock.

But given the evolutionary process currently underway, new opportunities can be found, thanks to technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, for controlling production processes through dialogue between machines, or between machines and humans, or by offering the possibility of foreseeing problems and proposing timely, effective solutions, including measures geared towards limiting emissions of pollutants and social inequality, as well as others designed to protect the rights and safety of workers (Arbizzani E., 2017).

Under the European Commission’s vision, the Industry 5.0 of the near future must increasingly become a “resilient provider of prosperity” able to ensure that the production of goods and services regains respect for the limits of the planet and places the well-being of users and workers at the centre of production processes. Nowadays, only large companies can implement digital technologies in their production processes, while small and medium-sized companies—typical of almost all enterprises in the construction sector—are unable to follow this trend.

The objective set by the European Commission for the development of technology, as the main tool for ensuring the sustainability of evolved production systems, appears to go in the direction of supporting precisely those sectors, such as construction, which are most fragile and faced with difficulties in their technological evolution, so as to encourage any process promoting circular economics, while providing increased skills and employment for workers.

As will be the case in all the most advanced industrial sectors, the make-up of new construction workers will be shaped by their interaction with technology, rather than by any replacement of those workers by machines. Workers supported by exoskeletons, augmented reality or virtual reality, or who are equipped with new-generation safety devices or connected to artificial intelligence or big data, or workers who work alongside robots, all appear to be futuristic visions. But, it is precisely the active interaction between man and machine which appears to be best suited to the evolution of a sector featuring intensive employment of human personnel, such as the construction sector.

With the decision taken recently by the government, we have come to the end of the construction boom that was temporarily underway in our country, thanks to the measures of economic support provided to the construction sector. Soon, there will be an urgent need to train and retool everybody working in the industry with the new digital production skills.

Initiatives carried out under a multidisciplinary, data-driven digital strategy can respond to the growing demand for higher quality, based on a predictable timetable in a complex environment, as well as to the need to satisfy requirements of environmental, social and economic sustainability, in combination with both technological and cultural considerations.

5 Conclusions

In all the latest reports on Europe as a whole and on individual countries, business enterprises are shown to be struggling with a scarcity of technical and digital skills, while the institutional bodies responsible for training appear incapable of meeting such demands. There can be no more putting off the need to return, even in our faculties of architecture, to an approach, both in teaching and scholarship, which combines both theory and practice.

Or better yet, an approach which preserves the paradigms of theoretical teaching for which our faculties are universally renowned, while resuming, with the utmost creative, organizational and technological effort, teaching of the discipline based on practical and productive project activities.

An approach both multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary must be put in place, regarding which this conference has simply offered food for thought by inviting leading scholars from other disciplines to present their visions of innovation in scientific research in the sector.

We all believe that technology has always consisted of a striving on the part of mankind, a reflection of people’s aspirations to improve their cultural situations, their very lives. The teaching of the discipline of design based on practical experience and immersion in constructed reality constitutes, at present, an unavoidable necessity, but one that can be used to expand the strengths of the sector in the direction of increasingly innovative, inclusive and sustainable scenarios for our surrounding environment.

The students who graduate from our faculties must be prepared to operate in their chosen field, but above all they must be able to use their skills as designers to produce a positive impact on the environment by applying their creativity to the real world. At the same time, there is an emergency that must be faced by a category of professionals obliged to undergo a rapid evolution of their knowledge and even more importantly of their cultural approach, in order to prepare them for a multidisciplinary profession in which the new tools of project support play a significant role.