Modular Design—What’s Old is New Again (and Again)

Modular Design means different things to different people. Sometimes it’s just about semantics. For instance, mobile homes are bad. Prefab houses designed by sophisticated architects (delivered on trailers) are good. But let’s start with some of the basics. Think of this concept as a system where the small building pieces that are individually created are assembled together to construct a larger functional whole. I think that the first modular building components that were created were probably a brick, a stick and a rock. Pile some of these things on top of or adjacent to one another and one can form some type of enclosure.

I’m sure that when the housing market for caves got “tight” and oversold, and Mr. Cave Man chose to no longer share his Man Cave with his mother–in –law, the original prehistoric D-I-Y endeavor was born. It was time for a stand-alone hut! Even Builder Tom incorporated a form of this basic technology in the building of the cathedrals.

As noted above, this may not really be that new a concept. Dating back to the 19th century, there were often pattern and plan books showing building and component designs that those skillful construction professionals could turn into finished buildings. In addition, people could buy complete house kits. The parts were prefabricated in a factory and transported via ship or train around the world or across the country.

The Arlington (Model No. 145); $1,294 to $2,906

Sears Roebuck provided many house kits in a number of styles for most of the early 20th century. From 1908 to 1940, Sears sold nearly 75,000 homes from 440 different styles through its mail-order Modern Homes program.

In the 1960s, Habitat 67 was built in Montreal Canada for the Word’s Fair. It is still there and really is iconic. It is a housing project using 354 concrete shoebox-like prefabricated modules that are stacked side by side, on top of one another, and others turned 90 degrees, creating a large complex reaching 12 stories in height. Some of the units were intended to be and/or have been combined to form larger housing spaces. There is a suggestion that Legos were involved.

Habitat 67

In 1968, the hotel that is now known as the Hilton Palacio del Rio in San Antonio was built across the street from the HemisFair. In this case, several floors were constructed in a conventional reinforced concrete system, then concrete box-like hotel room modules were stacked another 15 stories. I have stayed at this hotel many times and it is very functional, fun and solid.

Exterior of the Hilton Palacio del Rio in San Antonio

 

 

 

 

 

In 1971, Disney World’s Contemporary Hotel was built using modular construction when the rooms were built offsite, then transported to be fit into their structural frames. One of the interesting things about the Contemporary hotel was that the Disney World Monorail ran through it!

Think of these projects as giant steroidal Jenga games.

All of us architectural students from the late 1960s and early ’70s fell in love with these mega structures and did countless project schemes in design school as a solution to design problems that our instructors indirectly pointed us towards where these robust solutions were the only logical answer.

All of these projects still function for their original purpose are currently in use, and are well regarded in their communities. Would it not be interesting to see a modular hotel or housing project built over and around one the DART lines (red, blue, or orange)!

So these many centuries and/or years later, another new trend (or recently unearthed) in the building industry is modular design. Wow! Who would have ever guessed?

The building industry is primarily one where (almost) every project arising from the dirt has never been constructed before. Each job is almost always a prototype that has never been built on that particular site before. There are more variables to a construction project than hairstyles at your favorite salon. Many projects look alike (they are like relatives or family in resemblance and familiarity but still seem to retain all of the weirdness of Uncle Harold at Christmas).

Most McDonald’s resemble one another (continuing a branding experience), but most of them are not exactly the same due to individual site situations such as soils, orientation, municipal regulation, local citizen input, or goodness knows what else. But lately, more new projects are incorporating large-scale components of a standard design that are utilized for repeating elements of the new building.

McDonald's new design

Almost all buildings have a repeating structural module that is used for each structural bay. Many also incorporate repeating envelope modules (glass curtain walls, concrete tilt wall, or a combination of glass and some other material in a repetitive mode) to create a uniformity of the exterior façade. So now, if you can combine several of these subsystems in a methodical manner, you are creating modular facilities.

The Europeans have lately been involved in this process more than we have in the United States. For the Europeans, it was an attempt to respond to an economic environment of high wage and materials costs and relatively low productivity.

This process is being utilized at a number of scales from wall panels, to modular patient bathrooms at the new Parkland Hospital in Dallas, to entire buildings comprised of off-site manufactured units of housing, classrooms, offices, or laboratories. The majority of the work is completed in a factory along an assembly line by workers trained to perform the necessary tasks to complete a component. The workers have all of the tools and equipment needed to finish their work in the most efficient manner. In many cases the component is then passed along to the next line that might be “charged” with taking several of the large components and assembling them into a more complete whole unit which then may be delivered to the site and joined together to create a nearly finished facility. For the “right kind of projects” this system may combine the best of off-site and on- site construction.

It is possible that the actual cost of manufacturing and shipping in some particular circumstances could result in a higher cost per square foot than a “stick built” project, but off setting cost savings might be realized in the ability to deliver the project to the marketplace more quickly thereby reducing interest or carrying costs, or by the project generating revenue earlier. Savings from the utilization of this system might also come in the form or reduced on-site construction deployment, small needs for on-site trades, lesser requirements for material storage and staging, and less “shrink” of the construction products.

In other areas, used shipping containers are being re-purposed and stacked like Legos (again) to create hotels, stores, shopping centers, housing, emergency rooms, fire rescue facilities, and walk-up Starbucks coffee shops. After the earthquake devastated Haiti, a number of shelter solutions involved the utilization of shipping containers for housing and temporary facilities. Unfortunately, the solution achieved some utilization but not the anticipated ground swell acceptance that the design profession thought would happen.

So is this the way of the future for completing all projects?

Well it often is a very cost-effective solution. The opportunity to prefabricate elements can sometimes result in a high level of quality. There is a great deal of control in the process yet there can be flexibility. There can be some real savings of raw materials minimizing waste. The building process can, under the right circumstances, be accelerated.

But!

This is a system that is not going to work for everyone and everything. I think that for all of Modular Design’s virtues, the next church sanctuary or Perot-like museum will utilize a more traditional building construction delivery method. That is not to say that, like Parkland Hospital, there may be portions of any new project that incorporate certain systematically created design components that are used in the larger whole. Hybrids!!!!

Written By: Bruce M. Carlson

Source:http://realpoints.dmagazine.com/2013/03/bruce-carlson-modular-design%E2%80%94whats-old-is-new-again-and-again/

Modular Medical Buildings: Starting Your Own Practice

Medical professionals considering starting a new practice or expanding an existing one can open in less time by choosing modular construction.

The steps involved in opening a medical practice can be complicated and overwhelming. However, modular construction can provide a medical facility that meets all building codes and standards.  Brand new medical buildings can be built much quicker and more efficiently by utilizing modular construction.

Modular medical offices and buildings have taken the healthcare industry by storm because of the ease in which they can be designed and built. Modular buildings can be specially designed to fit the needs of a doctor and his/her patients whether it is a single story office building or a multi-story complex. Some options include, modular clinics, modular laboratories, modular medical offices, modular dental offices and hospital extensions.

Pre-leased modular buildings can save even more time and guarantee a medical practice is up and running in a fraction of the time it takes for traditional construction. Pre-leased medical buildings can be renovated to meet your unique needs.

Modular clinics are one of the easiest and best choices for the healthcare industry because of its reduced construction times, flexibility and quality. Using modular construction will allow you to focus on other aspects of the practice, like computer systems and software, medical insurance, recruiting of staff members etc. while leaving the construction process to the modular building contractor.

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

Benefits of Relocatable Buildings

The term “relocatable buildings” is not something new to many of us. However, it can be possible that we are not completely aware of the advantages of a relocatable building. In the past several years, the demand for relocatable buildings has sky rocketed. The modular construction industry has developed high quality mobile building designs in their projects that not only offer flexibility, but also allows the owners to easily relocate their building. Here are some of the top benefits of relocatable buildings.

Time Savings:

One of the best advantages of a relocatable building is the time savings. A relocatable building project takes less time to construct because they are primarily built in a climate-controlled factory environment and the entire building or major components can be reused for future use.

Portability Option:

As relocatable buildings can be transported, you can easily move these structures at any point of time. This becomes a huge benefit to a business owner who may want to move their store or office to a more prosperous area, or for school districts facing an increase in enrollment. Temporary/relocatable modular buildings can be used as additions to existing structures or stand-alone buildings.

Cost Effective:

Portable buildings can be more cost effective than traditional buildings because of its short construction time frame. Buildings are not site specific and can be easily disassembled, relocated and reconfigured for various uses, saving money on new construction.

Eco-friendly:

Portable buildings are environmental friendly because they can be re-used. That means the potential environmental impacts from demolition or new construction are eliminated. In fact, it is an extremely sustainable alternative to building a new structure. By relocating the buildings and structures from one site to another, landfill can also be minimized. In addition, such construction projects have minimal environmental impact as they make use of less construction materials. Furthermore, the on-site impact of a movable building project is comparatively lower than traditionally built structures.

Research Proclaims MH Rising

As PRWeb informs MHProNews, according to market research firm Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA), shipments of prefabricated homes are expected to reach 112,000 units by 2018 in the U.S. as the resurgence in housing and construction activity increases. 

The study covers manufactured, modular, panelized, and precut housing, but the manufactured housing segment comprises over half of the total shipments. Single-section growth of manufactured homes is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.9 percent for the next five years. While the rising demand for prefab housing is coming from the baby boomers, it is also driven by environmental awareness from those desiring eco-friendly and energy efficient homes which are being incorporated into factory-built product. 

Growth in this market in the U.S. has been stymied by the lack of financial support and incentives from the federal government, as well as by the ‘trailer park’ mentality long associated with the industry as a whole.

Photo credit: Chris Butler/Idaho Statesman

Source: http://www.mhmarketingsalesmanagement.com/blogs/daily-business-news/research-proclaims-mh-rising/

Written By: Matthew Silver

Benefits of Modular Construction for Building Green

In this day and age, the phrase green building is everywhere. For those who unfamiliar with green buildings, they are built to minimize potential environmental impacts and hazards often caused during and after the construction work. In addition, a green building promotes sustainable energy usage while offering a healthy indoor environment for occupants. 

Modular construction is the best choice for building green homes and buildings, because the majority of construction occurs in a climate-controlled factory environment, protecting materials from outdoor elements, reducing product waste and improving efficiency. With less work done on site, a modular construction project also helps in reducing environmental impacts and site disruption.

Now that the concept of a green building is clear, let’s discuss the benefits of modular construction for building green homes and buildings. Modular materials may include recycled glass, wood, carpet and bamboo. Some energy efficient features may include tankless water heaters, programmable thermostats, bamboo flooring, solar panels and ENERGY STAR appliances.

Modular buildings can be disassembled and relocated to other sites. This reduces the energy and raw materials needed to construct a new building. Modular construction has the ability to reuse entire buildings or major components.

Modularbuilding doesn’t always require heavy machinery and other construction machines. As a result, there is minimal noise pollution and greenhouse gas emission due to construction work. In addition, modular structures use alternative energy resources including both solar and wind energy, reducing operational costs.

Modular construction ensures better quality management, reduced product waste and a healthier environment by utilizing off site construction methods. The excellent and consistent quality control of modular construction, makes it a great choice for green projects.