The construction start-up company Katerra was a trailblazer, until it wasn’t. The Silicon Valley venture was launched in 2015, seeking to streamline the entire construction process through a comprehensive design-build model, encompassing everything from architectural design to manufacture and installation. Katerra’s “one-stop shop” for the built environment included factories in Arizona and Washington making everything from mass timber structural elements to kitchen countertops, all dedicated to replacing the waste-laden construction process with a streamlined, integrated approach more akin to automobile production. At its height, Katerra was viewed as an exemplar for how design and construction could embrace the highly efficient, vertically integrated processes that underpin many successful industries. Ultimately, it was not to be. After six turbulent years, which saw both rapid expansions at its highs, and investor bailouts at its lows, Katerra finally folded in June 2021.

    While Katerra’s alternative approach to construction ended in failure, the inception and media interest in the start-up was symptomatic of a wider desire among the architecture and construction industry to inject new ideas and business models into the design and fabrication of buildings. This desire is not without reason. In 2016, for instance, a report by McKinsey declared that the construction industry was “ripe for disruption,” noting that 20% of large projects are typically delivered late, and 80% delivered over budget. The report also posits that construction is not only less digitized that the automobile and technology sectors that it is frequently compared to, but is actually one of the least digitized in the entire economy. In McKinsey’s ranking of each economic sector’s embrace of digitization, “construction” is second from the bottom. Only “agriculture and hunting” was ranked lower.

    “While the construction sector has been slow to adopt processes and technology innovations, there is also a continuing challenge when it comes to fixing the basics,” the report concludes. “Project planning, for example, remains uncoordinated between the office and the field, and is often done on paper. Contracts do not include incentives for risk sharing and innovation; performance management is inadequate, and supply-chain practices are still unsophisticated. The industry has not yet embraced new digital technologies that need up-front investment, even if the long-term benefits are significant.”

    McKinsey’s conclusion, though damning, can also be viewed as a source of optimism for architects. While reflections on the future of practice often center on fears of growing irrelevance, heralded by a doomsday cocktail of automation, insurance costs, and the fracturing of project roles once held by the architect, the opportunities for disruption within the construction industry can offer frustrated designers a path to renewed relevance and purpose. As we showed in our recent in-depth look at architects designing software to combat climate change, and our ongoing Working Out-of-the-Box series, an architectural background presents an almost universal license to deviate, pivot, and innovate, whether within or beyond the architecture and construction industry. In the context of both the climate and affordable housing crises, this exercise in rethinking established processes, and repositioning the architectural profession itself, can uncover new ways of addressing longstanding problems.