I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming 30 years. And I, for one, welcome our robot overlords. OK, I’ll stop: I do understand there’s sensitivity around this topic, even if I personally believe that there will be plenty of work for humans in the construction industry of the future.
It’s a nice time of year in Switzerland and it was fantastic to spend a few days in Zurich. There were pre-conference workshops held during the first part…