Rome wasn’t built in a day, however, it might have been had they utilized prefabrication and modular construction.
Instead, they went with the traditional stick-built method, which, as we all know, involves a lot of guys in togas standing around arguing about blueprints, which were actually just drawings on stone tablets. This made change orders a real problem because you had to chisel out the old specs, and there was always that one guy who chipped away the wrong section and had to start over.
And don’t even get me started on their supply chain issues. Waiting six months for a shipment of marble because some galley ship got stuck in the Mediterranean was the ancient equivalent of your HVAC unit being “on backorder.”
Had the Romans embraced modular, they could’ve craned in entire aqueduct sections pre-plumbed, snapped together some prefab Colosseum panels, and wrapped the whole job up before Nero could pick out his fiddle.
Today, we have the technology (and fewer lions), but many projects still prefer the classic, slow, and expensive way — mostly because it feels like that’s how construction should be done: by assembling an army of subcontractors and hoping everyone shows up sometime before the next ice age.
But modular and prefabrication? It’s efficient. It’s faster. It’s like ordering the Empire off Amazon Prime — only with better structural integrity.
If we use prefabricated houses, can we build Rome in one day?
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