The opposition between one-off building processes - bringing together disparate actors as a fragmented team for a singular project, and the harmonization of stakeholders under one roof for the scaled production of building subassemblies off site - endures. Beyond the successes of the mobile home, factory-made buildings have failed to achieve any generalized use even though the assembly line was touted as a disruptive force capable of reforming conventional construction modes. The current design and construction culture is one of the biggest obstacles to off-site.
The potential advantages of industrialized construction are multiple and well documented: preassembly in a controlled manufacturing environment, precise design for fabrication, bulk material procurement, iterative optimizations, waste reduction, standardized repeating details from project to project, rigorous quality control methods and efficient task overlapping - producing elements in a factory while other work proceeds on site compresses schedules, reducing costs linked to project duration and site management (winter conditions, equipment rentals, etc.).
While these important factors argue for greater use of offsite construction methodologies, beyond the negative connotations, industrialization implies some particularities and drawbacks that must be managed. Greater upfront planning, collaboration and required stakeholder engagement from design phases are needed to reform the highly discordant processes ingrained in conventional onsite construction. The necessary collaborative process can be facilitated by contemporary virtual design and construction tools to achieve the information and detailing required to plan for streamlined manufacturing, delivery of components and onsite assembly. Reduced onsite flexibility is also discussed as an obstacle, however it should be noted that the onsite bricolage may be flexible, but, it is also intensely wasteful.
Architectural customization, singularity and cultural expressivity are also often cited as being unachievable with prefabricated systems. Buildings are anchored in settings that require civil, earthworks and groundwork adjustments that are not only difficult to repeat, but that characterize an edifice’s link to place. The interface between these informalities and the rigorous systemic repetition required for successful industrialized systems like modular volumetric construction should lead to new innovative systems and exploration aimed at marrying the cultural richness of individual sites with the efficiencies of offsite manufacturing.
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| Setting Offsite produced house on site |
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