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Billed as a session on rethinking micro-living through robotics and technology, the closing "Future Talk" at Heuer Dialog's Jahreskongress Temporäres Wohnen gathering in Berlin broadened into a larger question: why German construction remains too slow, too expensive and too dependent on a shrinking workforce. Moderated by Benjamin Oeckl of BelForm, the conversation paired George Salden of Capital Bay GmbH with Wulf von Borzyskowski of All3 Construction Germany — one betting on factory-built modular housing at industrial scale, the other on robotics deployed directly on site.
Von Borzyskowski's starting point was that small footprints expose the limits of conventional building methods more clearly than any other segment: speed, quality, cost and flexibility all under pressure at once. Micro-living, in his framing, is less a niche than a stress test for whether construction can finally be done differently.
Salden's case arrived with a concrete result behind it. Capital Bay's joint venture with Daiwa House — the Japanese company that has built more than two million housing units over 70 years — handed over what Salden described as the largest single volume of housing delivered in Europe just three weeks before the panel: 1,548 apartments for public landlord GEWOBAG in Berlin but manufactured at the partners' factory in Fürstenwalde beside Tesla's Brandenburg plant. REFIRE has tracked this project since early-2025, when half the residential site was still a hole in the ground.
On the panel, Salden's argument moved beyond delivery speed to financing. "Whoever controls time and money controls control," he said, arguing that cost and schedule certainty is what converts a development into a bankable, insurable product. He pointed to Germany's record of high-profile overruns — Berlin's BER airport, chief among them — as the result of a system where neither is reliably controlled. Daiwa's scale, he argued, changes that calculation: a company with the credit standing of a sovereign borrower (France), offering fixed-price, time-guaranteed delivery, removes the central risk that makes banks nervous.
Von Borzyskowski made the case for a different kind of industrialisation. All3, a vertically integrated construction technology platform, combines AI-driven design with robotic fabrication and on-site robotic assembly; its German operation, run as a general contractor, focuses on timber-based construction. The company's flagship robot, Mantis, is a 135-kilogram, stair-climbing machine, deployed first in London, capable of lifting and placing building elements of up to 100 kilograms. "A robot that can do everything is a robot that can do nothing," von Borzyskowski said. Mastering a narrow set of tasks rather than attempting general-purpose construction is what gives Mantis its edge.
The economic case rests on a stark imbalance: labour costs account for more than 60% of construction spending, against under 5% in comparable manufacturing industries — a gap von Borzyskowski linked to Germany's demographic trajectory, with the working-age population set to shrink by 1.2 million by 2035. All3 is currently quoting under €2,400 per square metre net for turnkey delivery, against a German average of around €4,800, with a stated target of cutting costs by 30%. A recent Munich project of 179 units was assembled in 14 weeks, roughly half the conventional timeline.
Safety questions from the audience prompted detail on how the robots are controlled: each is geofenced by AI and trained to separate human and robot work zones, with site managers monitoring a live feed around the clock. Von Borzyskowski acknowledged that insurers have been sceptical. But one developer using the technology put the appeal more bluntly: rather than managing 200 people on site, he can now manage 20 to do the same job.
The two approaches suit different settings. Salden's modular logic works best, he argued, the further a project sits from dense urban contexts; von Borzyskowski's serial, robotic approach is built for irregular urban plots where a building must adapt to a constrained site rather than the reverse.
Both speakers arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. One through factories, the other through robotics. Either way, housing is beginning to look less like traditional construction and more like manufacturing. Von Borzyskowski put his own gloss on it: the people worth talking to, he said, are those who see this as a systemic question about how Germany builds — not simply a product to be bought.