ABSTRACT
Even this rough classification shows a wide variety of stages of industrialisation in all regions. Additionally each area has its own atypical cases.
The stages of industrialisation of building in each society reflect the general phase of industrial development in the society, but also other
factors such as culture and building traditions. This emerges particularly when comparing the most developed regions like Europe, North America and Japan. In Europe, where building traditions are highly respected, industrialisation is not at the level that the general knowledge and industrialisation of the society would allow. Typically larger countries seem to have a lower rate of development towards open industrialisation than do smaller ones. In fact the smaller European countries are those that lead the industrialisation process world-wide. These include Finland, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands which all apply open industrialisation in design and production. Newly developed countries already use mass production, which means increased application of closed building concepts from foreign countries, but increasingly flexible, partly open systems are already appearing. Hopefully this will lead to the same trends as already visible in some European countries. In developing countries, both in Africa and in Asia, the industrialisation of society has not yet progressed sufficiently to allow extensive use of industrialised building. In these countries only materials production and the production of small building parts can be industrialised and used in manual site manufacture.
