Living for Tomorrow | Metropolis Magazine | December 2002 Whether the project will succeed in persuading developers and builders to take on its means and methods is a big question. MIT's would not be the first project to be thwarted by industry recalcitrance. Even the government-backed, multibillion-dollar initiative of the 1970s, Operation Breakthrough--which set out to increase housing production and reduce costs with an engineered approach to building--failed to infiltrate what is essentially a craft-based industry. Bob Kuehn, a Massachusetts builder, welcomes MIT's initiative but remains skeptical about its applicability. "Frankly I don't see it," he says. "There are too many barriers from the way the craft unions are organized. It's hard to come in and say, 'This used to be carpentry, but now it's somebody else's work.' I can remember when we stopped using lumber and went to metal studs, and what a big fight that was."

Larson pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the industry: "It's fragmented, conservative, worried about lawsuits, resistant to change, and involves labor-intensive processes that no industry in the world would use."