Zhe Lin's Response to Reading 6: Changing Building Sites

This passage describes the history of industrialization from Industrial Revolution to nowadays. Robotic fabrication is the latest one and knowing the status of fabrication before robotic fabrication really helps me understand the appearance of robotic fabrication.

Generally, construction goes from manual work to automatic work, from mass production to customized production, from western to eastern. Because of the serious housing shortage during the 1920s and 1930s, there was a huge demand in saving time and cost of construction. At that time, industrialization was introduced to building process. Then prefabrication was used in more and more process of construction. Above mainly happened in Europe and US. In the 1960s, Asian countries, especially Japan, began to explore automation in prefabrication and construction. Automation in prefabrication first came out, which was quite successful with customization and personalization. Then Japan invented single-task construction robots which were used on the construction sites. Later in Japan integrated automated construction sites appeared, which was not widely used because of its expensive costs.

We are now in the era of robotic fabrication, which is automatic and customized and Robotic fabrication is gradually changing the construction sites. I understand the pros and cons of robotic fabrication better by contrasting it to previous construction method. Robotic fabrication is still used mainly in small scale construction and too expensive to be widely used. We need to expand the range of robotic fabrication in order to use it in common construction sites. However, I believe that robotic fabrication is just a process, not the end in the history of industrial construction, like other previous processes. As the society changes and the demands of customers change, new technology will come out.