Prefabrication, industrialized building systems and offsite construction are valued for their potential to reduce costs, condense timelines and to bolster quality standards. As tasks are transferred into factory and manufacturing settings, the effective harmonized workflows that are applied in other industries bring added value to the preassembly of large building fragments to facilitate on site coordination. Still marginally applied when compared to conventional construction methods, the climate crisis along with housing and labour shortages have put prefabrication on policy makers' radar to address many current challenges.
Among present drivers for innovation in prefabrication is the need to decarbonize the built environment, reducing embodied carbon of materials and methods along with infrastructures' operational carbon. Offsite manufacturing has the potential to reduce waste at every step of the fabrication process; this argues for its systematic use even though comprehensive studies demonstrating relative reduction in embodied carbon are lacking and offer contradicting viewpoints. Component fabrication reduces embodied carbon by optimizing material use, however in some cases, as in modular volumetric construction, embodied carbon can be slightly higher due to material redundancy.
Holistic, whole building studies are complex and require methodologies that account for the immense variety of materials, components, contexts, seasonal variables, climate conditions and processes involved in building construction. It can be simple enough to calculate embodied carbon of site cast concrete versus offsite cast panels; however they only account for a specific element within the building’s overall footprint.
All seem to agree that offsite construction’s shorter schedules, in part due to task overlapping logically lead to lower carbon emissions; if the construction of a building is reduced by 3 months over a 12-month schedule, time savings translate to less travel to and from sites for everything from workers, tooling and machinery. Further, projects that are built in extreme conditions require heating. Propane or any other type of energy is squandered as buildings' temporary enclosures offer little climate performance. Onsite's wastefulness is well-documented which can easily be mitigated with offsite construction.
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| Carbon emissions from buildings - diagram by lmnarchitects.com |
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