More Units Going Up in a Snap

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Workers in Pennsylvania install walls for modular units, the building blocks for a seven-story apartment on a lot in Inwood.

A vacant lot on Broadway between Academy and 204th Streets in Inwood is littered with rubble and concrete pilings. But in a matter of weeks, this 50-foot-wide sand pit will be transformed into a seven-story apartment building, with finished bathrooms, maple cabinetry and 10 terraces. It is not a magic trick, but rather the result of modular, or prefabricated, construction.

Ryan Collerd for The New York Times

A worker in Pennsylvania welds together steel for the modular units.

A technique in which a building is manufactured piecemeal on a factory assembly line, trucked to the construction site and erected much the way Legos are, modular construction is gaining popularity across New York City. It is not new, but it has never gained much of a foothold here, in part because of its association with low-cost housing like mobile homes. That perception is changing; the city does not track modular data, but at least anecdotally, more developers and architects are embracing its ethos.

“Historically, people have had negative associations with modular construction,” said David J. Burney, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction, “and certainly within the design industry, it didn’t have much cachet. But there has been a sea change, and now there is much less of a distinction over whether a building has been assembled off-site or on-site.”

Ryan Collerd for The New York Times

The lot in Inwood, between Academy and 204th Streets, where the modular building will stand.

The announcement late last year that Forest City Ratnerwould use modular construction to build its first residential tower at the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn helped to shine a spotlight on this method of construction, and New York City, in announcing the winner of its first microunit apartment building design contest, has chosen a modular design.

The trend toward modular does pose issues, particularly for New York City’s powerful construction unions. It means exporting some construction jobs to factories outside New York, and while many modular factories are unionized, the employees tend to earn less than traditional construction workers. For its part, Forest City Ratner announced that the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York had created a modular division to help build its 32-story high-rise, and it joined with Skanska USA in creating a modular company at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“Any change in the way you do business involves some concerns and issues,” said Richard T. Anderson, the president of the New York Building Congress, a nonprofit organization that represents professionals in the construction industry. “If for New York City construction, business as usual is a challenge, you need to change some of the basic ingredients, and labor and management needs to address this.”

Gary LaBarbera, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, declined to comment.

As for the $13 million Inwood project, it will consist of 56 modules that are under construction in Berwick, Pa. The modules will be combined to create 28 apartments: 6 studios, 6 one-bedrooms, 14 two-bedrooms and 2 three-bedrooms. Twenty percent of the rentals will rent below market rate, and the project, which is scheduled to open this summer, will also include 3,600 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

While the facades of modular buildings can be anything from red brick to glass, “we chose to express the stacked modules,” Thomas Gluck, a principal of the architecture firm Gluck+, said in describing the boxy design. The building, in homage to its origin, is named Broadway Stack.

Jeffrey M. Brown, the chief executive of Brown Hill Development of Huntingdon, Pa., which is building the project with Kim Frank, the owner of the real estate finance company MCA, said, “We always wanted to use modular construction for this project.”

The two acquired the property in 2008 and have been working from the outset with Gluck+, which also has an ownership stake.

It is taking four months to manufacture the modules, during which time the team has been building the foundation at the site. “The factory has been able to create 28,000 square feet of residential space in the same amount of time it has taken us to construct 6,000 square feet of cellar space,” Mr. Gluck said.

On successive nights beginning in early April, the modules, which have steel and concrete frames, will be trucked four to five at a time to the building site from the factory.

On each of the following mornings for about four weeks, an enormous crane will stack the modules. Workers will then “zip” them up, connecting one to the next, and to the building’s plumbing and electrical systems.

The project is expected to take 9 months from start to finish, compared with 16 to 18 months if construction had been done on-site. “Because it takes half the time,” Ms. Frank said, “we can rent out the units and generate income much quicker, and the carrying costs are lower.”

Mr. Brown concurred, pointing out that if traditional on-site construction had been used, the project would have cost an additional 10 percent to 20 percent.

Because modular units are built on an assembly line — which is a quarter-mile in length at the Pennsylvania factory — there are constraints, including having to choose the paint colors, finishes, appliances and every other detail upfront. It is also impossible to make substantial changes partway through the construction, and because each module must be structurally sound, the walls and floors of the buildings tend to be thicker than in on-site construction.

There are other differences as well, said Peter L. Gluck, another principal of Gluck+, who began designing and building modular projects in the 1960s. “In the first three weeks of production they manufacture one entire module, which is basically like getting to see a full-scale mock-up of your project,” he said. “We can watch the entire building process and do quality control, correcting something immediately.”

With traditional construction, oversight is more time-consuming because someone must be on the site at all times to catch mistakes. “With prefab,” said Peter Gluck, “everything is done the same, so once we make a fix, it is fixed permanently.”

Also, because construction takes place indoors, there are no delays or damages to the material from inclement weather.

Modular construction may provide sustainability benefits, too. “We can recycle everything, all of the packaging materials, the gypsum, every piece of steel,” said Tom O’Hara, the director of business development at the Capsys Corporation, a modular builder based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “because none of our products get wet or are affected by the elements.”

DeLuxe Building Systems, which has been actively pursuing New York City developers, has several projects in the works, including an 11-story Harlem rental in the pre-construction phase; it is also in discussions with a developer of two 24-story rental towers.

“We are starting to hear from a lot of developers about modular building,” said Stephen G. Kliegerman, the president of Halstead Property Development Marketing, which was hired to market a 12-story modular rental building in Manhattan south of 96th Street.

Most of the modular projects in the works are rentals. “It is still relatively untested,” Mr. Kliegerman said, “so there needs to be some kind of track record before developers will feel comfortable using it to build condominiums.”

Mr. O’Hara of Capsys said his firm was “getting a dozen calls a week from developers who want to explore what is, for them, a new type of technology.” He added, “There is a vibrancy in the air now that we haven’t felt in a long time.”

Written By: Julie Satow

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/realestate/inwood-prefab-homes-win-converts-in-new-york.html?_r=0