The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated supply chain issues in the global economy, aggravated isolation challenges for existing health care facilities and combined with the characteristic struggles of the construction industry brewed a perfect storm for increased uptake and worldwide attention toward prefabricated building production. This backdrop along with exponential global population urbanization ballooning from 36% to 62% in 20 years defines an acute need for scaling production of affordable urban housing. In China, the government decreed a 15-year plan to expand industrialized building systems’ use to 30% of all new housing starts doubling the stagnating 10-15%.
Construction in China is a highly fragmented sector; however exports of prefabricated buildings and sub-assemblies have matured to a 1.66 billion dollar industry making China one of the most important prefab exporters. The industry promotes volumetric construction over other systems and mega-hospitals built in a matter of weeks in reaction to the covid crisis demonstrated the extreme speed that can be achieved through the assembly of edifices with manufactured chunks. Contrary to traditional construction, building these health care facilities began while boxes were produced in a factory and then while volumes were assembled on site, manufacturing continued in a just-in-time coordinated effort overlapping site work with manufacturing schedules. Images of these rapidly built hospitals were seen the world over, and prefabrication was promoted as a strategic method to revisit construction’s lacking productivity and to supply all types of buildings affordably.
Even before the pandemic, since 2017, China invested massively in domestic production specifically to define novel construction processes. While building hospitals did rely on prefabrication and efficient manufacturing, it is noteworthy that the entire planning and construction operation was directed by centralized governance afforded all powers and resources to reach a determined goal. Fabricating modules was the easy part of the process; designing a working efficient hospital in record time including all systemic and functional requirements is where the Chinese model supersedes conventional construction. Concentrating all decisions along with investing the required time and labor accordingly shows how a streamlined process could lead to redefining construction from a fragmented wasteful act to a coordinated and harmonized productive process.
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| Modular hospital during construction |
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