Construction Physics

Reading List 04/04/2026

Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more

Brian PotterApr 4, 2026

Reading List 04/25/26

Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.

Brian PotterApr 25, 2026

Reading List 05/16/26

Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.

Brian PotterMay 16, 2026

Reading List 05/30/26

A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.

Brian PotterMay 30, 2026

Reading List 06/06/26

Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more

Brian PotterJun 6, 2026

Welcome to Construction Physics, a newsletter about the forces shaping the construction industry.

Brian Potter6 min read

How Long Will a Home Last?

Plus: octagon houses, chart rooms, Soviet apartment blocks and truss-joist hybrids

Brian Potter6 min read

Making Modular Construction More Modular

Plus: The Easyframe system, ACI committee on 3D printing, and cinder slab construction

Brian Potter7 min read

Industrialized Building, Part 2

Welcome to Construction Physics, a newsletter about the forces shaping the construction industry.

Brian Potter8 min read

Construction Costs Around the World: How Does the US Compare?

Welcome to Construction Physics, a newsletter about the forces shaping the construction industry.

Balloon Framing is Worse is Better

Today in the US, most houses and apartments are built using light framed wood construction. This system consists of load bearing walls made from 2x4s or 2x6s, which support a wood-framed floor or roof - usually either trusses, joists, or engineered i-joists. This system is a variant of a framing style known as balloon framed construction, and though it may not look particularly impressive, it’s one of the most important developments in the history of building technology.

Comparing Flooring Systems

When designing a multistory [0] building, there’s quite a few different options to choose for floor framing systems. Floor framing is more loosely coupled to the rest of the building than other structural elements - it’s often possible to swap out flooring systems while leaving the rest of the building unchanged. There’s some limitations - you can’t use a wood framing system in type I or type II construction for instance. And some systems have more natural synergies than others - if the rest of your building is cast concrete, it probably makes sense for your floor to be concrete too. But generally for a given building, there are at least a few different options for floor framing.

Brian Potter8 min read

Logistics, Production Volume, and Industrialized Building

In general, when manufacturing something, the larger your production volume, the greater your efficiency and the lower your costs per unit.

Brian Potter9 min read

WW2 Era Mass-Produced Housing (Part 1)

World War II and Housing World War 2 era America was a time of massive upheaval in the residential construction industry. During the war, nearly 1 million people migrated to defense areas to work at munitions plants, shipyards, naval bases, and other areas of wartime production. The San Francisco Bay area, responsible for

Brian Potter9 min read

WW2 Era Mass-Produced Housing (Part 2)

In 1940, California was the fifth largest state in the US, tied with Ohio at 6.9 million people. Over the next 30 years, thanks in part to enormous spending on military facilities and wartime factories [0], it’s population would nearly triple to just under 20 million. It would surpass New York as the most populous state in 1962.

Interview with Scott Reynolds, Co-Founder of UpCodes

This week’s Construction Physics is an interview with Scott Reynolds. Scott is the co-founder of UpCodes, a startup building tools to make understanding and working with the building code easier. I was interested in Scott’s perspective on how the building code could be improved, as well as what the construction startup landscape is like.

Brian Potter23 min read

Operation Breakthrough: America's Failed Government Program to Industrialize Home Production

In the late 1960s, the US was perceived to be on the cusp of a severe housing shortage. Several national advisory groups (The National Commission on Urban Problems, the President’s Committee on Urban Housing , and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) estimated that 26 million homes needed to be built over the next 10 years, a rate of production that had never been achieved [0]. 6 million of those would need to be affordable to low-income families, at a time when half of all US families were unable to purchase a home of average cost. Failure to provide sufficient housing, they warned, would result in riots, unrest, and “urban chaos”.

Broad Group's Building Systems (Part I)

What has the firm capable of building a 30 story skyscraper in 15 days been up to?

Book Review: Building an Affordable House

A book that accidently explains the entire construction industry

Brian Potter9 min read

Facit Homes, Wikihouse, and the Plywood Frame

Prefabricated or factory-built construction is often touted as a more advanced, more modern way of building.

3D Printed Buildings

Developments in the construction industry tend to stay below most folks’ radar. Despite being responsible for the entire built environment (as well as a huge fraction of GDP), it’s rare for news in the sector to spread beyond industry trade publications.

Brian Potter20 min read

Folding at Home

Taking a look at foldable structures

Another Day in Katerradise

Last week the construction startup Katerra declared that it was shuttering it’s US operations, putting another L on the board for Softbank’s Vision Fund.

Brian Potter18 min read

Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?

On her YouTube channel, Belinda Carr poses an interesting question: why did agriculture mechanize (ie: replace manual labor with machine labor), but not construction?

Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction

Anyone involved with developing a new building system knows that it’s incredibly difficult to get anyone in the industry to actually use your system.

Brian Potter13 min read

Wood Construction and The Risk of Fire

Whenever the topic of wildfires comes up, someone always mentions [1] that US homes are built almost entirely made from wood, that it’s senselessly risky to build homes out of a material that burns, and homes should be built from some non-combustible material like steel or concrete like they do in civilized countries.

Brian Potter13 min read

60 Years of Homebuilding

To a first approximation, every housing unit that gets built in the US is required to have a building permit - a document from the government granting permission to build it.

Brian Potter13 min read

Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice

It’s often hard to find valuable academic research on construction - the number of useful papers seems low, beyond just what would be implied by Sturgeon’s Law. It largely seems written for an audience of other academics, and tends to be fairly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of actually putting a building together.

Brian Potter8 min read