Construction Management - The Construction Industry

Explore how the history of the construction industry reveals its societal impact, highlighting early builders' creativity, ingenuity, and tenacity as building science evolves to meet modern challenges.

Explore the origins of the construction industry from the Stone Age to early cities, where bronze and iron tools expand building capabilities, advancing shelter, settlements, and public structures.

Egyptians shifted to stone for buildings, moving massive rock to construct the great pyramids. The master builder merged architecture, engineering, and construction, codifying workmanship standards in the Code of Hammurabi.

Explore how Greek master builders organized stonemasons for marble temples like the Parthenon, signaling the birth of the building trades concept.

Explore how the Roman Empire advanced architecture, engineering, and building science through concrete, domes, arches, roads, and iconic structures like the Colosseum and Pantheon.

The middle ages saw a decline in building after Rome, then around 900 ad the church revived stone construction, spurring gothic cathedrals and craft guilds and master, journeyman, apprentice trades.

Trace the renaissance's renewed interest in architecture and building, as Alberti proposes drawings to direct the master builder without involvement, signaling a shift to separate design and construction.

Explore how the Industrial Revolution reshaped the construction industry, distinguishing architecture, engineering, and building while cast iron and steam power transformed bridges, railways, and modern construction.

Steel framing enabled high-rise buildings, while Portland cement, reinforced concrete, and mass-produced glass clad frames; elevators and electric power propelled skyscrapers into a global, big-business industry.

Spurring a postwar construction boom, mechanized tools, panelized construction, and prefabrication reshape building, while codes, standards, and specifications regulate materials and methods, and project controls measure time, cost, and quality.

Explore how new technologies transform the construction industry, with computer applications for estimating, scheduling, cost accounting, and project controls, plus BIM, GPS, VR/AR, virtual mockups, and field mobility.

Explore the built environment through the five construction sectors (residential, commercial, heavy civil, industrial, and environmental), showing how means, methods, and materials differ and drive sector-specific careers.

Explore residential building to understand housing needs, from custom to production builders, and the wood frame methods, materials, and market dynamics shaping home construction.

Explore the commercial building sector, from banks to hospitals and high-rise offices, detailing steel, concrete, and glass, complex systems, and fast delivery methods.

Explore heavy civil construction, the horizontal infrastructure sector building roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, airports, and railways with large equipment. Understand capital barriers, civil engineering focus, and long-duration, publicly funded projects.

Explore industrial construction, where engineers lead the installation of large equipment and process systems inside simple shells, with strict quality standards, long timelines, remote locations, and private funding.

Explore environmental construction from water conveyance and treatment to brownfield redevelopment, and learn how managers coordinate pumps, valves, filters and membranes under regulatory requirements to protect public health.