Empire State Building Project: Archetype of “Mass Construction” R. Sacks 1 and R. Partouche 2 Abstract: Analysis of historical projects, with the dual benefits of hindsight and modern concepts of construction systems, can help fill the gaps in our theoretical understanding of production in construction, which have increasingly been identified as a barrier to progress in improving construction project management. The richness of the historical record describing construction of the Empire State Building provides a unique opportunity to analyze and compare it with the paradigms of craft, industrialized, and lean construction. Its size and its record rate of construction, which has not been broken since for tall buildings, make it of prime interest. The project progress was reconstructed using line-of-balance software and its different flows were assessed. The results lead to the conclusion that it is an archetypal example of what we propose be called “mass construction.” This enables a richer understanding of the taxonomy of production systems in construction, and should aid theoreticians and practitioners alike to devise better production systems for construction projects. DOI: 10.1061/ASCECO.1943-7862.0000162 CE Database subject headings: Buildings, high-rise; Lean construction; Production management; History; Construction manage- ment. Author keywords: Buildings, high-rise; Lean construction; Production management. Introduction “The Empire State Building is not any skyscraper. Extraordinary in 1931 for its height, sheer size and unmatched speed of erection, the tower has since been exceeded only in height and mass” Wil- lis and Friedman 1998. The Empire State Building ESB set speed records for both design and construction and was com- pleted well within its initial budget Tauranac 1995; Willis and Friedman 1998. The contracts with the architects were signed in September 1929 and the first structural columns were set in April 1930. Only 1 year later, the building was fully enclosed, with a height equivalent to 102 stories, 200, 000 m 2 of rental space, 57,000 t of structural steel, 48,000 m 3 of concrete, 10 million bricks, and the involvement of almost 3,500 workers on-site on peak days Willis and Friedman 1998. The rate of construction of apparently similar tall office build- ings appears to have declined steadily since that time Partouche 2009. Fig. 1 shows the construction rates for the world’s 100 tallest high-rise buildings built between 1929 and 2008, in terms of: 1 the number of floors per year and 2 the floor area built per year of construction. These are not literal measures— buildings top out well before they are complete—but rather rep- resent gross measures of overall construction rate in proportion to height and size. While the chart does not account for factors such as safety, quality or design complexity, the trend for construction of tall buildings is toward slower rates. This appears to be anoma- lous when one considers the technological advances that have been made over this period in construction equipment, materials, methods, communications, and computing, all of which presum- ably make construction more efficient. Recent developments in the understanding of project and pro- duction management in construction provide a new and fertile basis for revisiting record-setting construction projects such as that of the ESB. Warszawski Warszawski 1990 provided formal definitions for industrialized construction, adopting the prevalent deterministic approach to construction management embodied in the critical-path method. Koskela’s report on the applicability of the “new production philosophy” to construction Koskela 1992, and Ballard’s development of the Last Planner System Ballard 2000b; Ballard and Howell 1998, introduced an alternative way of thinking of production systems in construction. The primary thrust of this work was to supplement the “trans- formation” view, in which projects are broken down into hierar- chies of activities at numerous levels of resolution and then managed as separate packages, with a “flow” view, in which projects are seen as continuous processes in which value is pro- gressively added to construction products. The flow view enables explicit consideration of cycle times, work in progress WIP and time buffers between production activities, and nonvalue adding activities. The three views of transformation, flow, and value, have been collectively termed “TFV” Koskela 2000. Subse- quent papers on the nature of flow in construction Bertelsen et al. 2007 and the structure of the construction industry Bertelsen and Sacks 2007 are more recent attempts to define theoretical aspects of what has come to be called “lean construction.” These developments in theoretical thinking are the basis for our analysis of the ESB project. While the transformation view has traditionally been the basis for construction research, we base our analysis on the flow view. The research aimed to reconstruct 1 Associate Professor, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineer- ing, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel corre- sponding author. E-mail: cvsacks@techunix.technion.ac.il 2 Graduate Student, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. E-mail: rbk.partouche@gmail.com Note. This manuscript was submitted on February 9, 2009; approved on October 13, 2009; published online on October 22, 2009. Discussion period open until November 1, 2010; separate discussions must be sub- mitted for individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Con- struction Engineering and Management, Vol. 136, No. 6, June 1, 2010. ©ASCE, ISSN 0733-9364/2010/6-702–710/$25.00. 702 / JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT © ASCE / JUNE 2010 Downloaded 20 May 2010 to 132.68.128.194. Redistribution subject to ASCE license or copyright. Visit http://www.ascelibrary.org