Prefabrication experiments - 498 - Platforms : Bridging the Gap between Construction and Manufacturing

Decades after large-scale building programs in almost every industrialized nation, prefab, offsite and industrialized building systems’ use remains marginal due, in part, to the highly fragmented and conservative nature of the building industry. Can any new theoretical and practical viewpoints prompt long-term reform? New methods and technologies, particularly digitization, are seen as systemic innovations that fundamentally reorganize construction processes and reposition factory production as an efficient use of digital twins. 

 

Construction 4.0, like many revolutions before it, has promoted offsite construction in the same way that mass production did by positing the analogy with car production and later in the way the Toyota Production System and automation in Japan did for Lean construction. The Internet of Things’ total connectivity and comprehensive parameter control point toward these theories and their possibilities for design and construction. Much literature is devoted to this revolution in particular work done by English firm Bryden Wood.

 

The publication Platforms – Bridging the Gap between Construction and Manufacturing (2017) moved from cars, planes and ships that have become the go-to comparative icons to  «platforms» along with their all-encompassing links to manufacturing, shipping, economy and technologies and offered a new generation of prefab protagonists a way forward. Using patterns, analysed assets, and standardized interchangeable components, the firm argues for a kit-of-parts ideal to assemble a variety of building types. 

 

While touted as a revolution, platforms reprocess older ideas with a fresh lexicon. The authors’ three proposed platforms based on a comprehensive analysis of government buildings’ characteristics revive Fritz Hallers’s Mini Midi Maxi (blog post 178) with the added value of digital configurators to support the design process. Heading toward the milestone of 500 articles on prefab,  the theoretical and practical  links between platforms, patterns, systems theory, archetypes and models are clear – Camus’ heavy prefab for residential panel blocks (blog post 311), Depondt’s steel framed prefab (blog post 158), Sekisui’s modular (blog post 62) and even Alvar Aalto’s AA House System (blog post 458) can all be qualified in retrospect as building platforms, showcasing the continuous recycling of prefabricated ideas.

2017 Publication in favour of platform theory applied to building delivery