Chairman & Executive Director, Hansen Yuncken
BSc (Arch) (UNSW), FAIB

David Beslich addressed graduates from the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Thursday 9 May 2013, 10.30am.

Our speaker today is Mr David Beslich.

David has been a Director of construction company Hansen Yuncken since 1995 and was appointed as Chairman in 2011.

David is responsible for the strategic growth of Hansen Yuncken. His particular focus is on the creation of an innovative, modern construction business, through the use of “smart technologies” and integrated work processes in the delivery of Hansen Yuncken’s various projects.

David was the Project Director at Hansen Yuncken for its $250 million New Orange Hospital and Associated Health Facilities Public Private Partnership, and the Building and Education Revolution NSW Schools $480 million contract.

Currently he is Hansen Yuncken’s representative on the Hansen Yuncken Leighton Contractor’s Joint Venture Board, managing the construction of Australia’s largest Hospital, the $1.85 billion New Royal Adelaide Hospital Public Private Partnership.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Mr David Beslich to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Deputy Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Dean of faculty, Presiding Register, representatives of the Academic Board, UTS staff, distinguished guests, graduates, their family and friends.

There is a tremendous sense of achievement within this place today and rightly so.

With this sense of achievement, there is also raw energy and excitement at the possibilities that await you as you set out in your professional careers.

You will leave this place today and go into an industry where your vocational training is an important starting point in your individual success.

Like some of you, my initial training was in Architecture; however, I now represent the 4th generation of one of Australia’s oldest and largest private construction business, Hansen Yuncken.

For all of our history and the many thousand projects we have undertaken since beginning in 1918, there is simplicity that underpins the Hansen Yuncken business success. Firstly, It is our regard for and the importance of our people, their skill, commitment, endurance and energy. It is also our ability to capture and transfer knowledge, and applying this knowledge to improve our construction processes and adapt in an ever changing and highly competitive business environment.

Whilst today may represent to you an ending to the education process, I ask you to consider that your success will be dependent on how well you apply your skills, commitment and energy, and, how quickly you adapt to your working environment. Above all, remember that you will make your mark and carve your success through a continued application to learning and improvement.

I am not here to lecture to you, and I am not old or wise enough to have any great pearls of wisdom, rather, I'll take this opportunity to impart some learnings I have gathered over the past 35 years.

I, like you, graduated on a day not to dissimilar to this. It was called the Faculty of Architecture in those days, and my training of choice was not in construction as you may think, but rather, in Architecture. The graduates produced back then went on to be participants in the construction and property industry; Architects, interior designers, landscape designers, builders, project managers, quantity surveyors, building product developers, property developers, and even property financiers and now the ubiquitous fund managers.

Over the last 35 years, there has been considerable change to the society in which we now find ourselves and the Industry in which all of these professional skills operate. New skills and professions have been added, and new industries developed, particularly in the industrial design, graphical design and the visualisation arena.

Like many other industries, the future of the building and construction industry will be based on its response to the digital age, access to new technologies, to instant information, and become a product of the computing speeds and software that make easy analysis of data and mathematical algorithms for analysing and problem solving.

This digital age has produced, and will continue to produce, tools that will greatly enhancing the skills of how and what we design, as well as how we construct things. This is not just related to the architecture and construction; think about the advances in medical sciences where 3D design tools and scanners are being used to replicate body parts, and 3D printers using stem cells to literally print these body parts for doctors to implant. Think of the possibilities.

But I digress. Although I want to inspire you to activate and to dream of the new possibilities within
your area of interest and new skill sets, I also want to be concrete and direct about where I see the applications of these new technologies will be within the construction industry. I want you to consider how, with your new skills, you can take up this challenge and make your mark within this industry and your profession.

In my view, innovation has been the champion of the 21st century. Design is responding to new technologies, new considerations for a future sustainability, and a continual desire to find the new way, with new materials, new tools, new ways of considering things, all fuelled by a new found human intellect, and the tools of the digital age; its emphasis on graphics, virtualisation, simulation and the use of smart technologies.

More than any time in the past, highly conceptualised architecture is being constructed. Take the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Birds Nest Stadium of Beijing, or closer to home, the Frank Ghery building around the corner.

The new tools of 3D design, visualisation tools through which BIM models produced, and computer aided manufacturing processes, are up-skilling traditional construction processes to enable these designs to be constructed.

It is interesting to note that Hansen Yuncken now owns more computers and computer software than it does tower cranes, despite the fact that we deliver $1.2bn of building projects each year.

Do underestimate the power your generation of new professionals holds in enabling the construction industry to take up the challenge of digital innovation, or and to adapt or change the construction work processes using the new digital tools.

My vision for the future requires new skills and the ability to integrate smart technologies within more traditional construction management processes.

It will require construction companies like Hansen Yuncken, to continue to value the skills of new graduates, and for tech savvy graduates to understand the role they will play in championing innovation to fuel the construction industry of the future.

I ask you to consider this challenge, and I wish you every success for your future.