All roads in construction lead offsite. so what's on the agenda for the industry's big players.
Putting a building together on a production line rather than a site raises build quality and productivity, and uses a mechanised army of factory hands to sidestep the alarming shrinkage in construction's skills base. Last year, construction spent 拢600m on modular buildings; by 2009 this figure is expected to reach 拢6.6bn. With more and more construction companies going modular (and putting around two-thirds of the value of each contract in the hands of one supplier in doing so), we take a look at how the module makers compare. Pod: Part of a building, typically kitchens and bathrooms, which is made in a factory and slotted into its final position onsite. Pods are non-structural elements: they fit into a concrete/steel/timber frame that stops the building falling down. LPanellised. 星空传媒s delivered as flat-packed kits of parts. Wall, roof and ceiling panels are made in the factory but screwed together onsite. Volumetric: Walls, ceilings and floors built and fitted together in a factory with the resulting box trucked to site and craned into position. The supplier therefore transports the space inside the box along with the module itself. Module sizes are limited by trailer sizes, and the cost of the obligatory police escort for anything wider than 3.8m. Modular: Factory-assembled rooms contained in a box that also holds the building up. A structural form of volumetric.Corus, formerly British Steel, has successfully pushed the use of steel in high-rise construction over the last 20 years, but has found the housing market a harder nut to crack. In order to score a slice of the action, the company has formed a joint venture with developer Redrow, called Framing Solutions, to produce steel-framed housing. Corus鈥� new modular division, Corus Living Solutions, and based at its Shotton works, uses the joint venture鈥檚 steel frames to make modules, which it delivers ready assembled. At the moment Corus hand-builds the modules but expects to have the production line fully automated by Christmas. Scott Carr, Living Solutions general manager, says the company鈥檚 first big order is to deliver modules for an accommodation wing at a management college this summer. 鈥淭o be credible, we鈥檝e got to deliver on time,鈥� says Carr. 鈥淲hat we鈥檙e selling is certainty of cost and delivery.鈥� As well as long experience in the construction market (30% of the company鈥檚 turnover comes from construction), Corus has manufacturing expertise and reckons it can exploit its experience in supplying the car industry. 鈥淢odular construction is at the Model T Ford rather than the Mercedes stage,鈥� says Carr. 鈥淭here鈥檚 opportunity for a lot of rapid product innovation.鈥� Enquiry number 204 Rather than building steel-framed modules in a factory before transporting them to site and stacking them up, Space4 makes timber-framed foam-injected wall panels in its factory and delivers them as flat-packed house kits. The floor arrives as a cassette of I-beams and decking. It鈥檚 a bit like ordering a house from IKEA, except that Space4 custom-builds its kits. Set up by house builder Westbury three years ago, in the wake of a research project into fast-track building, Space4 reported a loss of 拢3.5m for 2002/3. Plans to build around 2000 house kits this year for its parent and a similar number for other house builders. It takes one hour to make a kit in the factory and a day to assemble it onsite. Westbury has taken the (for house builders) unusual step of creating a manufacturing capacity in order to expand the business. Robin Davies, Westbury development director, says it was the only way the company could get more choice, faster build times, more houses and control over production. Current kits incorporate plumbing; the next generation will fit the wiring too. Space4 has built 1200 kits so far, using 60 different house designs, and has 200 possible layouts on its CAD/CAM system. Davies says it鈥檚 very competitive with standard timber frame and reckons there are no barriers to adoption: it looks utterly traditional, with pitched roofing and brick cladding installed on site. Enquiry number 205 Steel-framed module maker Terrapin started out producing prefabricated houses after World War II before moving into Travelodges and the educational market. The company now makes modules completely finished internally and externally at the factory. All that remains to do on site is to bolt the modules together, connect up the services and put the roof on. Besides preassembled modules, Terrapin makes roof, floor and wall panels that are fixed together onsite. MD Nick Whitehouse says cost savings and investment in production only come when clients place big orders. His model client is Prime Focus, a registered social landlord which persuaded three different architects to use common modules for projects for the frail elderly on three sites. For the project Terrapin built 150 identical kitchen/living room modules and 150 modules incorporating either two bedrooms or one bedroom and extra storage. Terrapin builds test modules and gets everyone with a stake in a project to visit 鈥� in the case of the Prime Focus blocks, prospective residents, Help the Aged, nurses and designers. 鈥淚t鈥檚 brilliant because everyone buys in, even when they contradict each other,鈥� says Whitehouse. 鈥淔or example, the kitchens have a viewing hatch into the corridor. Some people who run homes like the visibility: they can see residents are OK. Some residents like it too, but it makes others feel like they鈥檙e being spied on. So we put the windows in, but fitted a blind on the inside.鈥� Enquiry number 206An offshoot of Portakabin, the company that gave its name to the container-like site huts plonked down off the back of a lorry, Yorkon is one of the best-established modular fabricators in the UK. As the builder of a new wave of prestigious modular housing projects 鈥� the Peabody Trust鈥檚 Murray Grove and York Council鈥檚 Sixth Avenue 鈥� it is also one of the most prominent. Yorkon鈥檚 steel-framed modules can arrive on site complete with floors, ceilings and services. It sends modules to hotels with pictures on the wall, and to housing projects with carpet in the lounge. MD Keith Blanshard has positioned Yorkon to mop up the 鈥渕assive government money鈥� pouring into health, education and housing. He鈥檚 got no intention of competing in the market for two/three-bedroom semis. 鈥淭he volume timber-frame guys can do that. They鈥檙e more competitive than we are,鈥� he says. In housing, Yorkon is about multi-storey apartment blocks. Probably the only boss of a modular factory who was actually brought up in a prefab, Blanshard says the image of postwar concrete prefabs as shoddy, jerry-built structures wasn鈥檛 the reality. 鈥淧eople liked living in them. Nowadays I live in an old house. It鈥檚 got death-watch beetle, no cavity wall and I had to pay extra for it!鈥� Professionals as well as purchasers see modular build as lower quality and poorer value. In choosing quality as his rallying cry 鈥� and Yorkon has won a string of design awards 鈥� Blanshard is attempting to turn the tables. 鈥淲e want to win people over,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we do the Murray Groves and the Classroom of the Future.鈥� Enquiry number 207
What modular means
Modular construction covers more than just metal boxes that look like shipping containers. A module is no more than a pre-assembled element of a building, so you could (and people do) argue that structures made of pre-fired blocks of sand and clay 鈥� bricks, in other words 鈥� are modular. Current definitions of modular tend to draw the following distinctions:
Corus steels itself
Space4鈥檚 flat-packed homes
Terrapin鈥檚 home help
The quality crusade
Source
Construction Manager
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