21st Century Construction The Chartered Institute of Building

Following World Environment Day 2024, we dig into a complex and difficult question.
Construction is the single biggest source of greenhouse gases.
It produces vast amounts of waste.
The resource extraction needed to feed its demands puts enormous pressure on habitats and biodiversity.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of buildings stand empty, even as we prepare to build hundreds of thousands more.
So, what does enough look like?
To explore this issue, 21CC editor Rod Sweet is joined by some of the most advanced thinkers in sustainable construction today.
In this bracing and thought-provoking discussion, you’ll hear from:
• Hero Bennett, sustainability leader at building services engineers, Max Fordham;
• Will Arnold, climate action leader at the Institution of Structural Engineers and lead author of the proposed Part Z embodied carbon regulation for the UK;
• Saul Humphrey, consultant and professor of sustainable construction at Anglia Ruskin University;
• Hudson Worsley, chair of Australia’s Materials & Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance (34.47); and
• Amanda Williams, head of environmental sustainability at the Chartered Institute of Building.

Building Saudi’s Red Sea high-end tourist giga-project

From bare sand to a collection of 50 separate resorts with its own international airport on Saudi Arabia’s remote west coast, The Red Sea giga-project is a high-end tourism scheme like no other. We speak to Andrew Tyson, head of construction at Red Sea Global, who’s in charge of bringing it all together.

Robotic micro-factories for housebuilding?
[00:25] High-tech companies down through the years have often seen construction as a tantalising frontier, ripe for disruption by new ways of putting things together.
Now, the Swiss multinational manufacturer ABB has entered the fray, with an idea for building affordable housing using robots at site-based micro-factories.
They’ve teamed up with UK architects Automated Architecture (AUAR) to develop the idea.
Global Construction Review’s David Rogers speaks to Craig McDonnell, managing director of ABB Robotics, to learn more.
UCEM goes to schools
[10:10] The University College of Estate Management (UCEM) has been educating built-environment professionals for generations.
Now, they’ve launched a new campaign of outreach to schools.
It says tapping into young people’s naturally fertile imaginations can help enthuse them about the interesting careers available in construction.
CIOB People editor Nadine Buddoo speaks to Charlotte Thackeray, UCEM’s outreach and inclusion lead, to find out more.

Happy Birthday, CIOB! Three young professionals look ahead [01:00]
To celebrate the 190th anniversary of the founding of the Chartered Institute of Building, we speak to three young CIOB people from around the world – members of the Tomorrow’s Leaders network – about the one thing they’d like to change about the industry and how the CIOB can help with that.
This stimulating exchange features:
• Tadiwa Taimu, 23, a junior project manager building a retirement complex in Cape Town, South Africa;
• Ziad Abdeen, 25, a contracts engineer working on various projects in Dubai; and
• Dr Hamza Momade, 31, a construction project manager with Roni Group in Toronto, and professor of construction management at Ontario’s Durham College.
Michael Brown looks back [13:37]
Many will remember Michael Brown, educator, industry diplomat, and former CIOB deputy chief executive.
In 1966, he was one of the first people ever to enrol in the brand new BSc in Building at Lanchester Polytechnic, now Coventry University. That degree became the foundation of construction management education ever since.
He tells us how exotic he was as a graduate on site, what construction and the Institute were like before email, and suggests a few missions the CIOB might take on in its next 190 years.
Data-led construction [21:47]
The CIOB’s Royal Charter obliges it to promote the science and practice of building for the public benefit, so Justin Stanton is here to ask industry leaders how data can facilitate higher-performance construction.
Diving into this are:
• Paul Drayton, head of digital for Europe at Laing O’Rourke;
• Gareth Handley, director of operations at Wates Group;
• Andy Steele, strategic adviser and former chief executive of Osborne; and
• Paul Bamforth, head of global strategic accounts at Buildots.

Crushed by a horse, now crushing prejudice [00:32]
Elite Australian athlete Hacia Atherton spent seven months in hospital recovering from a near-fatal accident in 2017.
She was told she may never walk again, but she was having none of it.
It took many months after leaving hospital, but she fought the pain and self-doubt to get back on her feet.
In the process, she hatched a new mission in life: to make the construction trades a beautiful career for women and men.
Her unique approach with Empowered Women In Trades (EWIT) has helped thousands of women take up a trade in an industry where only 3% of tradespeople are female, and she’s only just getting started.
Construction Skills Olympians [11:12]
November saw the WorldSkills UK National Finals, highlighting the talents of the country’s up-and-coming professionals.
One of the competition’s categories was Digital Construction, and Justin Stanton spoke to three digital construction specialists who came away with medals: Rebekah Over, Tom Bowles, and Calam Kearney.
The rhetoric of modernisation [20:20]
Have you ever wondered why report after report telling the industry to “modernise” never change anything? Or why they seem to bear little relation to the way the industry even works?
University of Reading Professor Stuart Green has been studying the construction “improvement” agenda for 30 years.
The second edition of his book, Making Sense of Construction Improvement, came out last month, covering the years of austerity, Brexit, and what he calls the “perma-crisis” gripping the industry, marked by a string of disasters including collapsing Edinburgh schools, the Grenfell catastrophe, and the ruination of Carillion.
Its overarching theme is the idea that “modernisation” itself is used as a kind of propaganda to deflect attention away from what really stops us improving quality, safety, and productivity.
It’s genius, he says, because while nobody can really define what “modern” construction means, absolutely nobody wants to be seen as old-fashioned.

The home of great construction stories. We go behind the headlines to meet the people who envision, create and manage the built world. Brought to you by the Chartered Institute of Building.
Got a topic you'd like us to cover? Email the podcast editor Rod Sweet rod@atompublishing.co.uk
In this episode:
New-homes confidence crisis [01:20]
In December, CIOB published results from a survey that showed an overwhelmingly negative public perception of new-build houses.
It asked 2,000 UK adults what they thought, and 55% of them believed that old houses are better than new ones.
32% described new-build housing as ‘poor-quality’.
There is a new set of standards called the New Homes Quality Code that is supposed to hold builders accountable, but signing up to it is voluntary.
CIOB recommends that government reviews this to consider making it mandatory.
CM deputy editor Cristina Lago spoke to the report’s author, the CIOB’s David Parry, to find out what this all means.
Get the CIOB report: https://www.ciob.org/industry/research/newbuilds  
Lego-style building system [09:51]
A 96-unit apartment complex built with Lego-style, snap-together blocks has opened its doors to residents in Palm Springs, Florida.
It was put up by a small crew of unskilled workers armed only with mallets and glue guns.
The blocks are made from recycled plastic and glass fibre. 
Glued together, they form a monolithic structure that is impervious to water, mould, and termites, and can withstand 250mph winds. 
The material is lighter and stronger than concrete, and making the blocks produces a tiny fraction of the emissions concrete does.
The company behind the system, Renco USA, spent 10 years in testing, research and development.
In October they raised $18m in their first funding round to build a US factory with a view to making the system available across the country.
Renco USA executive Patrick Murphy tells this month’s 21CC Podcast how they did it, and why they’re not like Katerra.
Can project managers be coaches? [19:21]
Dave Stitt FCIOB used to be hard as nails.
A civil engineer, he came into the industry as a teenager and rose through the ranks at big UK contractors Taylor Woodrow, Birse, and Wates, thinking he had to be the toughest, meanest, and bossiest person on site.
Then he reformatted his style after he found himself leading culture-change programmes at national construction firms.
Now, he coaches construction leadership teams on team-building and people skills, and is convinced that construction managers should stop giving orders on site.
Instead, they should coach.
But how do you do that, and won’t it lead to chaos? Hear Dave make his case.