Last Thursday, some of the Woobius team attended an event called The Hammers III, a “construction computing awards” dinner.

The point of the evening was to give awards to industry leaders amongst software firms that provide construction-related software, to recognise their contribution to the creation of great architecture. As a provider of such software ourselves, we (the Woobius team) wanted to attend, if only to become better acquainted with how the industry thinks.

Take-aways and insights

First of all, the construction computing community is small and tightly knit. There were not a great number of people at the awards ceremony, and everyone knew about everyone else (except for us of course). People were very open and friendly, and willing to discuss almost anything. There was very little competitivity on display.

This matches with what we discovered during our market research: the industry is very entrenched, almost an old boy’s club of companies with strong client relationships, servicing the top tier of the industry (large practices with large projects).

Everyone was of course worried about the coming recession and its impact on construction, but not overly so. There were some slightly snide remarks about such and such firm having mostly banks as clients (with obvious implications), but beyond that, no one seemed to feel that the recession would overly affect them.

An understated event

Another important point, immediately obvious when we arrived and looked at the seating plan, was how small the event was in comparison with typical architectural awards such as the Leaf awards or the FX award. There were, all told, at most 120 people there. Most of them came with two to three colleagues or clients. There were about twenty awards. Simple maths implies that most of the guests were there to receive awards.

Part of the evening involved a stand-up comedian lightening up the mood after dinner. Opinions vary about whether he was funny (I thought he was!), but one of the recurring themes of his jokes was making fun of the industry – from the lack of female attendance to the inescapable “not fun” factor of the intersection between corporate IT and construction. Both of those industries are traditionally regarded as “boring” – male-dominated, not very dynamic, a bit stodgy, etc, and our comedian exploited this thoroughly.

In many ways, he made the event smaller than it was and than it deserves to be, encouraging the industry’s least flattering stereotypes, downplaying its impact and importance, and making everyone feel like they should be slightly embarrassed to be there at all.

The most important

This is a mistake. Computing underlies almost all of architecture today, and much of construction. Many of the iconic buildings of the past decade were only possible by harnessing the power of computers. The construction computing awards ceremony should be the biggest and most exciting in the industry. The future of architecture is driven by computing, and these awards should reflect this fact.

If there is one constant driver for the evolution of the construction industry, throughout history, it is technology. And over the last half-century, much of that evolution has been driven by advances in computing technology. CAD software, as unexciting as it may seem on the surface, has made possible architectural prowess that could not have been dreamed of in the past. Collaboration technologies have allowed companies large and small to collaborate across geographical boundaries. Rapid prototyping tools are revolutionising the creative process by allowing architects to evolve their designs much more rapidly. Even new materials and fixtures have become achievable thanks to advances in computer modelling tools.

Of all the awards ceremonies in the construction industry, this should be the most important one. We sincerely hope that in the future, it will be.