If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which means those have to be created to more exacting standards and there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.
There is an environment component to this in that we shouldn’t be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out for anything that is not mass manufactured.
Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason, his employees worked death-march hours to have everything done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a conference call with more than a dozen people going over a checklist of more than 40 steps.)
Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis, and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the highest priority issues. And so the project limped across the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift cards.
But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got positive status reports with everything in the green. He was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in a different area, meaning that the code base he had created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker. I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another hero story for another ladder climber.
If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either didn't know or didn't care about the waste.
I'm not sure it's a problem that's entirely solvable without some kind of outside force.
That's the problem right there.
Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting up too many barriers to nuclear plants.
Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics at the jobs that they work at everyday.
Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame to the rest of the committee.
But that also means that we're not going to ever build like China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.
The same applies with building construction - the governance process have evolved to check for more things with more ability to say no and delay, but without being able to say no(or what needs to change) more quickly
Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things. One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...
Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was built on time and on budget even though they had not finished designing it when they started building. The basic notion is that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not necessarily make things better.
On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's "Confronting Managerialism": https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the work.