A few months prior, nothing stood at the corner of 2nd and Stewart. Not three floors of concrete and rebar, not the bellmen on their radios, not Skanska, Al, Bob, nor Maria. None of that was here, not even the luffing jib crane at the heart of this story.

Back then, this space was a freshly demolished and excavated patch of coveted real estate in downtown Seattle. Then early one morning, Apex Steel arrived, and by the evening a new crane had joined the cityscape. Of the 58 cranes that were counted in Seattle last year, Apex was responsible for 28.

“When we started [Apex Crane] in 2008, there were maybe a quarter of the cranes that are up now. We got in and had about a year of very good business before the bottom fell out,” says Kevin Koester, President of Apex Steel and their sister company, Apex Crane. During the height of the recession, Koester recalls that ”there were only about one or two cranes up in Seattle for quite some time until the construction industry came back in 2012, and things began to ramp up again.”

Unsurprisingly, 2016 ended up being the best fiscal year in Apex’s history. While much of that success is due to increased demand, cranes have also become more “erector-friendly,” according to Koester. Koester remembers experimenting with their own inventions to raise crane pieces to the top of a tower. Now manufacturers include built-in hoists to raise pendant connections (stabilizing bars that run from the tower top to the jib and counter jib) and fabricate modular systems that allow for various booms and towers to be fitted together.

“The biggest improvement I’ve seen has been in the mobile cranes we use to erect tower cranes,” says Koester of the motorized cranes on treads that lift sections into place for people to secure. “When I started, a 180-ton crane was about the biggest mobile crane in town. Now we use 550-ton cranes with luffing jibs.”

Still, with all the innovations and upgrades, it’s the quality of the people that really drives projects forward. “I always say that my tower crane crew looks like they walked out of a CrossFit gym, they’re beasts. But on top of that it took years to find the right people that could handle it physically and mentally. Ironworkers are a special breed. When it’s raining sideways and you’re working 10–12 hours a day, you have to have the right mindset.”

The work must also be highly choreographed to mitigate potentially catastrophic mistakes. “Every time we climb, we do it a certain way. We hand tools off in specific movements. That way there is no miscommunication. When you hand a guy a pin that’s covered in grease, so it doesn’t rust up in the tower, to a guy hanging off the edge of the section, you say, ‘Got it?’ and he replies ‘Got it!’”

Apex can erect a free-standing tower crane that stands over 200 feet tall in 10–12 hours. A lot of things have to go right though, and some things are out of the erector’s hands. Sometimes, bolts and pins are missing or sections coming from disparate places arrive at different times. And when costs run about $2,000 an hour, a four-hour wait can really add up. But when everything goes according to plan, there is a gracefulness to the erection of a tower crane that traverses the range of advanced machinery and raw humanity.

Beethoven’s 7th Symphony Allegretto could be playing in the background as a ballet of flatbed trucks and 550-ton mobile cranes with hoists and telescoping booms lift 20-foot tall 17-ton steel sections of crane tower. The thump of timpani and trumpets for each blow of a 20 lb. beater on the head of a steel pin. And the harmony of long violin, clarinet, and flute notes sounding the straining muscles of fearless ironworkers who hang off the edges to secure the next piece into place by hand as yet another tower crane climbs higher into the Seattle sky.

Ryan Salvas, Director of Innovation for Skanska USA’s Commercial Development team and an architect by training, has been thinking about the future of cranes of late. One idea is the viability of integrating cranes into the design of a structure as its spine or core. In effect, reducing the time, energy, and costs associated with disassembling, moving, and re-erecting cranes on different jobsites. For him, this is just the tip of the tower.

Some time ago, while studying geolocation and collision avoidance in multiple UAVs that were simultaneously thermal imaging a building, Salvas began to wonder, “How do we scale up to a vertical accumulation that includes autonomous systems?” When considering a project as an ecosystem of technologies that could potentially feed data into algorithms that activate unmanned systems, the tower crane becomes the giant elephant in the jobsite.

As Salvas dug deeper, he ran into questions regarding the flow of materials, “The challenge is developing an algorithm that accommodates material flow that is not perfectly timed,” and cranes, of course, are the biggest expedient of material flow today on a jobsite. “How do we improvise for that unforeseen change?” On some projects, cranes already factor into building information models, integrating the manufacturer rating of every piece, configuration, and process to develop schedules for the work it can perform.

Once autonomous vehicles become an everyday occurrence on the road, Salvas thinks a noticeable technology transfer into construction can take hold fairly quickly, though autonomous cranes may be further away. “The first adopters would likely be higher-profile projects that have a lot of logistics in place, using 5D building information models with clashes sussed out.” While these projects have higher visibility, they also have greater flexibility and an opportunity to innovate.

Projects around the world are trialing intriguing ideas such as remote operation, augmented and virtual reality, self erection, and new forms of mobility on cranes. Some of these concepts may become indispensable technological advancements, and yet the crane will likely look the same and serve almost the same purpose it always has. Meanwhile, innovation will continue to persist through the people who work on both ends of the hoist and below the slewing radius of the boom, even if the hook is just out of view.