Increasing process entanglement, systemic trade and labour shortages, the colossal environmental footprint of building construction, and skyrocketing costs are all valid arguments leading to the recent renewal of interest in offsite construction. Breaking with longstanding resistance among traditional stakeholders, lobbyists and policymakers are now looking for new ways to stimulate offsite practices and current manufacturing methodologies to address some of the challenges associated with conventional onsite building.
Specifically, when it comes to the provision of quality housing, industrializing production makes conceptual and practical sense; vast amounts of similar housing types with repeating services and organizations are required. Studying these patterns and parameters could help frame the type of standardization needed to implement harmonized systems over multiple proposals, thereby reducing, sharing and distributing initial investments. This cost amortization is the basic framework underpinning the success of mass production for other commodities.
While demonstrated in other sectors, the same question remains: how can these ideas be successfully and perennially translated to construction? If history and the subtexts of standardized versus personalized production have taught us anything about how to move forward, it’s that offsite and industrialization requires fundamental change for the adoption of the product normalization that seems to have improved prefab’s conditions in Asia and Scandinavia but continues to lag in other industrialized contexts defined by a highly fragmented procurement and project delivery process.
The integrated nature of industrialized building culture required inflects the types of reform that would rock conventional construction to its core. The ease and flexibility of one-off projects - getting them started with a trailer, some materials, tools and a small team - is hard to compete with when we imagine the upfront investments required for the manufacture of building subassemblies offsite in sufficient quantities alongside coordinated project pipelines. This is just one of the systemic differences that highlights process disparities obstructing higher uptake. Still, the degree of repetition in housing makes it a prime candidate for the regularity needed for creating patterns for realizing large quantities of affordable dwellings – only time will tell if the industry is ready for internal systemic transformations.
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| Integrated Process for Building Construction (Bryden Wood) |
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