Harsh lessons and encouraging signs after a rough year were the top line at the 2021 BuildTech virtual conference, ENR’s annual look at the state of construction technology and management. Contractors, engineers and other industry professionals offered their insights on how they kept working through a pandemic, and the new solutions they uncovered to age-old problems during a difficult time.
ENR special correspondent Tom Sawyer, who was drafted to help develop the first ENR BuildTech conference in 2019, says the planners this year studied feedback from readers and the attendees of ENR events and realized that people really wanted to meet across disciplines and share practical tips for finding synergy among different professions. But the challenges of working through the pandemic were an underlying current throughout the conference.