In 1910, the French artist Villemard created a series of illustrations imagining life in the year 2000. In one of his drawings, an architect sits in a booth pushing buttons on a console to manipulate a series of machines operating in the usual debris of a construction site. The various machines cut, shape, lift, and place stone blocks to build a house. There are no human laborers in his projection — mechanization has made them obsolete.

Villemard’s vision has not panned out, however. On the contrary, industry observers routinely deride the lack of technological sophistication in the construction industry, and have pigeon-holed it as old-fashioned and lagging behind more forward-looking and purposeful industries such as manufacturing.

This story has been told and told again. In the wake of the post-WWII housing boom, the editors of Fortune published a 1947 article titled “The Industry Capitalism Forgot,” in which they mocked homebuilding’s “feudal character” and “picayune scale.” In 2006, MIT Professor John Fernandez summed up the conventional wisdom when he wrote: “It is widely believed that construction is the slowest of all industries of such scale in implementing proven, scientifically sound technological innovation.” A decade later, McKinsey consultants continued the drumbeat, blaming limited productivity improvements on “poor project management and execution … underinvestment in skills development, R&D, and innovation.” In early 2023, University of Chicago economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson published an article titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector” in which they concluded that aggregate data “demonstrate a large and decades-long decline in construction sector productivity.”

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