Contribution to Costs of Architecture workshop,
June-August 2025.
June-August 2025.
“When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it, but when you cannot measure it, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind,”—maintained the 1970 report of the CIB, the International Council for Research and Innovation in Construction. Founded in the mid-1950s, the Council brought together efforts of European and global research institutions studying different aspects of building construction. Specifically, the W52 Working Group investigated problems of information flow and explored possibilities for designing a unified international building classification system administered by a computer. However, such international ambition posed many issues: how can one translate the many culturally specific cost variables of the construction process and classify them into universal data sets? The Working Group proposed adopting a Swedish SfB system, which classified construction processes into “activities” or “resources,” then assigned them to a specific cost unit and coded them into a unified catalogue. And while the new computer-based system was supposed to streamline construction and provide a better overview of building costs, it faced unexpected challenges. Construction labour costs, for example, were culturally specific variables, perceived, quantified, and processed differently in countries across Europe, let alone the rest of the world, introducing immediate algorithmic issues for a system with a global reach.
As part of a broader investigation of the role of language and translation in describing architectural processes via text, this essay is particularly interested in practical and intellectual frictions between the abstract universalism of the envisioned building classification system and the many incidental cost variables of a specific architectural project. Equipped with original archival sources produced by the CIB and intellectual mediations of the architects engaged with the system, this contribution challenges the element-to-cost quantification paradigm embedded in the W52 report and many BIM processes in architecture today.