Housing, Industrialized: Designing for Off-Site
Date Posted: December 19, 2023
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas,
From Probuilder: With one slight change to his floor plan schematic, architect Ryan White increased the production of a new single-family project by 33%.
How? By shaving just a foot off the depth of the three-story, side-by-side duplex destined for an infill lot in Pittsburgh, he enabled Structural Modular Innovations to build three boxes at a time on its factory floor instead of only two.
“Understanding the capabilities of the factory allowed us to meet the attainability goals for the project,” says White, director of design at Dahlin Group, in Irvine, Calif. “And losing that 1 foot didn’t affect the livability or marketability of the homes at all.”
As more home builders look to alternative production solutions such as modular and full-scale panelization to combat a chronic skilled labor shortage, volatile structural materials prices, and an increase in the overall cost to build, the level of design detail and collaboration with providers for new homes is paramount in achieving the benefits of industrialized construction.
“Design casts the biggest shadow in the whole process,” says Sara Logan, AIA, VP of design and Volumetric Building Companies, a vertically integrated modular provider based in Philadelphia. “When you look at a building as a product instead of a project, you realize that what you spend on design [typically 2% to 5% of the overall budget] has significant implications on bigger costs, such as materials [50%] and labor [15%].”
And while most builders ironically refer to their homes as “products,” considering their actual construction as a manufacturing process would be a mind shift for most of them and their design teams … but one that needs to take place if home builders want to successfully transition from on-site stick-building to an off-site or factory-built model for the bulk of their structural needs.
Design for Construction—in a Factory
True or not, a common trope holds that architects and designers think about the look, feel, and use of their buildings more than considering how those buildings will actually get built.
That may be OK-ish with a traditional stick-built production home, where construction documents are commonly open to a certain amount of interpretation and making changes in the field isn’t uncommon. Not so in a factory.