Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. And it's one of my favorite blogs on the internet. I highly, highly recommend that people check it out. Brian, my first question is about The Line project in Saudi Arabia.

(laughs)

What are your opinions?

Okay, yeah. Just this will be a, a, a s- just in no particular order. Um, one, that it's just, you know, interesting that this country, Saudi Arabia, is in the Middle East, just kind of in general, is just so willing to just do these big, crazy ambitious building projects, uh, and just pour just huge amounts of money in, in constructing this, this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in, like, the modern world, you know? They do it, China obviously does it, huge amounts. Um, there's some other minor places but in general, you don't see a whole lot of countries doing just these big, massive, uh, incredibly ambitious projects. So like, on that level, it's, like, interesting. It's like, yes, glad to see that you're doing this, but, like, the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense.

(laughs)

I mean, just from, like, a, a, just the physical arrangement layout, right? Like, there's a reason that cities, like, grow in, like, two dimensions, right? Like-

(laughs)

... a one-dimensional city is like the worst possible arrangement for just, like, transportation, right? It's like your maximum num- maximum amount of distance between any two points. And so, and y- you know, so just from that perspective, it's, like, clearly crazy. Uh, and there's n- there's no real benefit to it other than, you know, perhaps in some, like, weird hypothetical transportation s- situation where you had, like, really fast point to point transportation, uh, some sort of weird bullet train setup, maybe it would make sense. But there's no reason to build (laughs) there, in general, there's no reason to build, like, a city like that, right? Like even if you wanted to build, like, an entirely enclosed thing, which again, doesn't make a huge amount of sense, you would save so much material and effort if you just, you know, just make it a cube. Make it, I would be more interested in a cube-

(laughs)

... than, than The Line. But, uh, yeah, those are sort of my in- initial thoughts on it. I will, I'll be surprised if it, if it ever gets built, but-

The cube, like, from the meme about, like, you could fit all the humans in a cube the size of Manhattan? Or-

Yeah, exa- Yeah or something like that.

(laughs)

Or I mean, yeah, if you're just gonna build this g- big giant mega structure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is, like, you know, like, minimum surface area to volume, uh, ratio, stuff like that.