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construction-physics.com

Essays about buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Click to read Construction Physics, by Brian Potter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

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362 from 27 Sep 2020 to 29 Oct 2026
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weekly (94 in the last year)
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2026 79

  1. A New Kind of Chemistry
  2. Reading List 10/24/26
  3. Reading List 10/17/26
  4. How to Train Your Robot
  5. Reading List 10/10/26
  6. The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
  7. Reading List 2026-10-03
  8. Understanding the AI That Drives Robots
  9. Reading List 2026-09-26
  10. Reading List 09/19/2026
  11. How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
  12. Reading List — 09/12/2026
  13. Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?
  14. Reading List - 09/05/2026
  15. How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III
  16. Reading List 08/29/26
  17. How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works
  18. Reading List 08/22/26
  19. Reading List — 08/15/2026
  20. How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part II
  21. Reading List 08/08/2026
  22. What Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Do for Housing Supply?
  23. Reading List 08/01/26
  24. Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?
  25. Reading List 07/25/26
  26. Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials?
  27. Reading List 07/18/26
  28. How Predictable Are Laws?
  29. Reading List 07/11/26
  30. Reading List 07/04/26
  31. The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
  32. Reading List 06/27/26
  33. US Subways Build Too Many Cross Passages
  34. Reading List 06/20/26
  35. Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas
  36. Reading List 06/13/2026
  37. Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition
  38. Reading List 06/06/26
  39. How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?
  40. Reading List 05/30/26
  41. Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
  42. Reading List 05/23/26
  43. The Rise of Build-to-Rent Housing
  44. Reading List 05/16/26
  45. Reading List 05/09/2026
  46. How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?
  47. Reading List 05/02/2026
  48. How an Oil Refinery Works
  49. Reading List 04/25/26
  50. Construction Costs Rarely Fall
  51. Reading List 04/18/2026
  52. Reading List 04/11/2026
  53. Helium Is Hard to Replace
  54. Reading List 04/04/2026
  55. Information and Technological Evolution
  56. Reading List 03/28/26
  57. The Age of the Amplifier
  58. Reading List 03/21/26
  59. How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?
  60. Reading List 03/14/26
  61. The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home
  62. Reading List 03/07/2026
  63. A History of Operation Breakthrough
  64. Reading List 02/28/26
  65. Reading List 02/21/26
  66. Is the Future “AWS for Everything”?
  67. Reading list 02/14/26
  68. Trends in US Construction Productivity
  69. Reading List 02/06/2026
  70. Reading List for 01/31/2026
  71. On Technologies vs. Commodities
  72. Reading List 01/24/26
  73. Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time?
  74. Reading List 01/17/2026
  75. The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube
  76. Reading List 1/10/2026
  77. How Did TVs Get So Cheap?
  78. Reading List 01/03/2026
  79. Should US homebuilders emulate Sweden?

2025 90

  1. How Accurate Are Learning Curves?
  2. Reading List 12/20/25
  3. How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize
  4. Reading List 12/13/2025
  5. Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem
  6. Reading List 12/06/2025
  7. Reading List 11/29/25
  8. How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers
  9. Reading List 11/22/25
  10. How ASML Got EUV
  11. Reading List 11/15/25
  12. What Is A Production Process?
  13. Reading List 11/8/2025
  14. Strap Rail
  15. Reading List 11/01/2025
  16. How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry
  17. Reading List 10/25/25
  18. Reading List 10/18/25
  19. More on US Pedestrian Deaths
  20. My Book, The Origins of Efficiency, is Out Today
  21. Reading List 10/11/2025
  22. Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US?
  23. Reading List 10/04/2025
  24. Reading List 09/27/25
  25. How Common Is Accidental Invention?
  26. Reading List 09/20/25
  27. What’s Happening to Wholesale Electricity Prices?
  28. Reading List 09/13/2025
  29. An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project
  30. Reading List 09/06/2025
  31. I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption
  32. Ford and the Birth of the Model T
  33. Reading List 08/23/25
  34. How Does the US Use Water?
  35. Reading List 08/16/25
  36. My Book "The Origins of Efficiency" is Now Available for Preorder
  37. Reading List 08/09/2025
  38. Group Technology, the Forgotten Cousin of Lean Manufacturing
  39. Reading List 08/02/2025
  40. Reading List 07/26/25
  41. Where are Vacation Homes Located in the US?
  42. Reading List 07/19/25
  43. How China Became the World’s Biggest Shipbuilder
  44. Reading List 07/12/2025
  45. Should the Federal Government Sell Land?
  46. Reading List 07/05/2025
  47. Reading List 06/28/25
  48. Why Are Homes in Western States So Expensive?
  49. Reading List for 06/21/2025
  50. How Batteries Are Making the Electrical Grid More Reliable
  51. Reading List for 06/14/25
  52. Reading List for 06/07/2025
  53. How Common Is Multiple Invention?
  54. Reading List for 05/31/2025
  55. Can We Afford Large-Scale Solar PV?
  56. Reading List 05/24/25
  57. Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding
  58. Reading List for 05/17/2025
  59. Improving Naval Ship Acquisition
  60. Reading List 05/10/2025
  61. How the US Built 5,000 Ships in WWII
  62. Reading List 05/03/25
  63. Reading List 04/26/25
  64. Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard
  65. Reading List 04/19/25
  66. 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics
  67. Reading List 04/12/2025
  68. Understanding US Power Outages
  69. Reading List 04/5/2025
  70. Reading List 03/29/25
  71. Who Wins Nobel Prizes?
  72. Reading List 03/22/25
  73. Understanding Solar Energy
  74. Reading List 03/15/25
  75. Reading List 03/08/2025
  76. Will Boom Successfully Build a Supersonic Airliner?
  77. Reading List 03/01/25
  78. Why It's So Hard to Build a Jet Engine
  79. Reading list 02/22/25
  80. Reading List 02/15/25
  81. How Will the Trump Tariffs Affect Construction?
  82. Reading List 02/08/2025
  83. Inside the Interconnection Queue
  84. Reading List 02/01/2025
  85. Reading List 1/25/25
  86. Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?
  87. Reading List 01/18/25
  88. Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
  89. Reading List 1/11/25
  90. Reading List 01/04/2025

2024 57

  1. Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
  2. Reading List 12/28/24
  3. Reading List 12/21/2024
  4. Energy Cheat Sheet
  5. Reading List 12/14/24
  6. What Learning by Doing Looks Like
  7. Reading List 12/07/24
  8. Reading List 11/30/24
  9. How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery
  10. Reading List 11/23/24
  11. How Good Are American Roads?
  12. Reading List 11/16/24
  13. The Influence of Bell Labs
  14. Reading List 11/9/24
  15. Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz?
  16. How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.
  17. Will the China Cycle Come for Airbus and Boeing?
  18. Chinese Commercial Aircraft Reading List
  19. Port Automation Reading List
  20. Do U.S. Ports Need More Automation?
  21. Why the U.S. Can’t Build Icebreaking Ships
  22. Shipbuilding and Icebreakers Reading List
  23. Born Sleeping
  24. The Long Road to Fiber Optics
  25. Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?
  26. How to Build a 50,000 Ton Forging Press
  27. Is Land-Use Regulation Holding Back Construction Productivity?
  28. How California Turned Against Growth
  29. California Growth Reading List
  30. Why Levittown Didn't Revolutionize Homebuilding
  31. What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?
  32. Bell Labs Reading List
  33. Building the Bell System
  34. Will We Ever Get Fusion Power?
  35. Fusion Power Reading List
  36. How to Build an AI Data Center
  37. The Shape of Nuclear Policy
  38. How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years
  39. Will Stone Replace Steel and Concrete?
  40. How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab
  41. Semiconductor fab reading list
  42. The Katerra Team Rides Again: ONX Homes
  43. What Progress Has Icon Made on 3D-Printed Homes?
  44. What Makes Housing So Expensive?
  45. Why Did Supersonic Airliners Fail?
  46. Supersonic Air Travel Recommended Reading
  47. Mass Timber is Great, but It Will Not Solve the Housing Shortage
  48. Why Is It So Hard to Build an Airport?
  49. Airport Reading List
  50. How I Write Posts
  51. How Valuable Are Building Methods That Use Fewer Materials?
  52. A Cycle of Misery: The Business of Building Commercial Aircraft
  53. Boeing Reading List
  54. Machine Tool Reading List
  55. What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?
  56. What Progress Has There Been in Industrial Robots?
  57. On Yglesias on Manufactured Homes

2023 40

  1. “No inventions; no innovations," a History of US Steel
  2. Building Apollo
  3. Which Construction Tasks Have Gotten Cheaper?
  4. Could We Boost Housing Construction by Permitting ADUs Under the HUD Code?
  5. Welding and the Automation Frontier
  6. How the Gas Turbine Conquered the Electric Power Industry
  7. The Technological Innovations that Produced the Shale Revolution
  8. The Long, Sad History of American Attempts to Build High-Speed Rail, Part II
  9. The Long, Sad History of American Attempts to Build High-Speed Rail, Part I
  10. The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines
  11. How Washington DC Got Its Metro
  12. Contribute to the US Megaprojects Database!
  13. Why Do We Need Infrastructure Policy?
  14. How Fast Can a City Grow?
  15. How the Car Came to LA
  16. The Worst US Bridges are Getting Fixed
  17. We Need More Research on how CO2 Affects Cognition
  18. The Rise and Fall of the Mail-Order Home
  19. The Story of Titanium
  20. The Grid, Part IV: The Hard and Soft Paths of Energy Strategy
  21. The Grid, Part III: The Dream of Deregulation
  22. The Grid, Part II: The Golden Age of the Power Industry
  23. The Birth of the Grid
  24. Book Review: Healthy Buildings
  25. Could We Stop Yellowstone From Erupting with a Giant Geothermal Power Plant?
  26. How Did Solar Power Get Cheap? Part II
  27. How Did Solar Power Get Cheap? Part I
  28. Could ChatGPT Become an Architect?
  29. Which City Builds Skyscrapers the Fastest?
  30. When Did New York Start Building Slowly?
  31. How Much Safer has Construction Gotten?
  32. Construction Productivity: Structural Steel
  33. The Blast Furnace: 800 Years of Technology Improvement
  34. On Klein on Construction
  35. Does Construction Ever Get Cheaper?
  36. Weekend Roundup: Icon, Diamond Age, Cuby, Gropyus
  37. Goolsbee and Syverson on Construction Productivity
  38. The Rise of Steel, Part II
  39. Roman vs Modern Concrete
  40. The Rise of Steel, Part I

2022 41

  1. Building Fast and Slow, Part IV: Construction of the World Trade Center
  2. Building Fast and Slow, Part III: Design of the World Trade Center
  3. Building Fast and Slow, Part II: The World Trade Center
  4. Building Fast and Slow, Part 1: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center
  5. Comparing Process Improvement in Manufacturing and Construction: Duco vs. Drywall
  6. An Overview of Concrete Forming Technology
  7. Why Did We Wait so Long for Wind Power? Part III: Offshore Wind
  8. Debunking the "Housing variety as a barrier to mass production" Hypothesis
  9. Why Did We Wait so Long for Wind Power? Part II
  10. Why Did We Wait so Long for Wind Power? Part I
  11. Why Aren't There Economies of Scale in Building Size?
  12. Where Do Economies of Scale Come From?
  13. Why Are There so Few Economies of Scale in Construction?
  14. How NEPA Works
  15. How Building Codes Work in the US
  16. The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home, Part II
  17. The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home, Part I
  18. Why Are Nuclear Power Construction Costs so High? Part III: the Nuclear Navy
  19. Why Are Nuclear Power Construction Costs so High? Part II
  20. Why Are Nuclear Power Construction Costs so High? Part I
  21. Industrialized Production of Joy: Interview with Tyler Goss
  22. The Ups and Downs of Automated Code Checking Software
  23. Is There a Housing Shortage or Not?
  24. Interview with Alice Leung, VP at Brick and Mortar Ventures
  25. The Prefab Pivot
  26. The Evolution of Indoor Climate, Part II
  27. The Evolution of Indoor Climate, Part I
  28. The Science of Production
  29. A Brief History of Construction Startups
  30. Lessons from Shipbuilding Productivity, Part II
  31. Lessons from Shipbuilding Productivity - Part I
  32. Looking at Energy Use in US Residential Buildings
  33. How much do construction costs matter? Some factors that affect the price of housing
  34. Interview with Anthony Hauck, cofounder of Hypar
  35. Construction Physics Table of Contents
  36. So you want to use less concrete
  37. Announcements - IFP Partnership, Slack Channel, Works in Progress
  38. Construction Physics Slack - Code of Conduct
  39. Batch, Flow, and Variability
  40. Book Review - the Sources of Increased Efficiency
  41. How to design a house to last for 1000 years (part III)

2021 43

  1. How to design a house to last 1000 years (part II)
  2. How to design a house to last 1000 years (Part I)
  3. Where are my damn learning curves?
  4. Construction, Ford, and a Lever to Move the World
  5. What Construction Innovation Uptake Looks Like
  6. Japan’s Skyscraper Factories
  7. Construction and the Toyota Production System
  8. Measuring Construction Efficiency
  9. Sketch of a Theory of Construction Productivity, and a Research Road map
  10. Construction Physics - Year One Retrospective
  11. Mass Effects
  12. Bricks and the Industrial Revolution
  13. Design Bid Build and the Construction Value Chain
  14. Building Complexity and the Construction Community of Practice
  15. BIM, Revit, and the Database Dream
  16. Real Estate, Property Rights, and Negotiation
  17. Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers?
  18. 60 Years of Homebuilding
  19. Wood Construction and The Risk of Fire
  20. Weekend Reading: Ise Jingu
  21. Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction
  22. Why did agriculture mechanize and not construction?
  23. Another Day in Katerradise
  24. Folding at Home
  25. 3D Printed Buildings and Technology S-Curves
  26. Lumber Price FAQ
  27. Construction, Efficiency, and Production Systems
  28. Facit Homes, Wikihouse, and the Plywood Frame
  29. Book Review: Building an Affordable House
  30. Autovol, Stack Modular, and Labor Arbitrage
  31. The Lustron Home
  32. Construction Cost Breakdown and Partial Industrialization
  33. Interview with David Menard, Product Manager for Unity Reflect
  34. Building Components, and the Past and Future of Construction
  35. Broad Group, Part II
  36. Broad Group's Building Systems (Part I)
  37. Operation Breakthrough: America's Failed Government Program to Industrialize Home Production
  38. Interview with Scott Reynolds, Co-Founder of UpCodes
  39. WW2 Era Mass-Produced Housing (Part 2)
  40. WW2 Era Mass-Produced Housing (Part 1)
  41. Logistics, Production Volume, and Industrialized Building
  42. Comparing Flooring Systems
  43. Balloon Framing is Worse is Better

2020 12

  1. Construction Costs Around the World: How Does the US Compare?
  2. Buildings for Every Budget
  3. Industrialized Building, Part 2
  4. Book Review: Industrialized Building
  5. Biltmore and Building Specialization
  6. Toyota's Prefab Homes
  7. Every Building in America - an Analysis of the US Building Stock
  8. Stronger, Faster, Cheaper: The Future of Wood
  9. Factory Built Homes? It’s More Likely Than You Think.
  10. Making Modular Construction More Modular
  11. How Long Will a Home Last?
  12. Construction physics