Foreword
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Alistair Parvin
Foreword by Alastair Parvin
There is a running joke in construction that ‘prefabrication has been the future for as long as anyone can remember’. It’s a theoretical vision of the future, not a present reality.
But we can no longer afford for that to be true. In the next decade, we face a perfect storm of crises. A housing crisis, climate collapse, an ageing population, rising healthcare costs, declining local economies. This means building and upgrading millions of homes. It means an historic shift from fossil fuels to green energy. There is simply no way to meet those challenges without transforming the way we build: moving away from the wasteful, laborious and carbon-intensive methods we inherited, such as bricks and concrete.
We all know what the future of construction needs to look like: zero-carbon buildings; high-performance, manufactured components, made from regionally-grown, bio-based materials. Modules that can be rapidly assembled on-site, making building faster, simpler and better. Then, at the end of a building’s life, every component can be reused or recycled: a fully ‘circular’ economy.
And yet, it still isn’t happening, at least, not at scale. Time and again, we find ourselves reading news headlines about major offsite ventures winding-up. Councils are turning away from ‘Design for Manufacturing and Assembly’ (DfMA), because they see it as an unreliable supply chain.
The problem is not the goal itself – it’s how we go about it.
When we think of offsite manufacturing, we tend to think of large, centralised factories, producing whole homes like a Fordist production line. They cost millions of pounds upfront to set up, but can be incredibly efficient if you can get them up and running at full capacity, feeding a continuous pipeline of demand. Except – you can’t. Because in the messy, uncertain world of property market cycles, the UK planning system and project delays, there is no continuous pipeline of demand. Huge, gleaming factories find themselves sitting empty for weeks at a time.
Even if we got this model working (as one day, hopefully, we will) it will only ever be, at best, a part of the answer. While the housing market is dominated by a handful of major developers building mostly-identical homes, centralised manufacturing models ignore the vast potential of the thousands of small businesses that are such a crucial part of the construction economy. If we are going to transform the way we build, it can’t just be a handful of large companies with proprietary products: it has to be the whole industry.
At the core of this project is a different strategy: where instead of investing in a few huge modular housing factories, we grow a distributed network of small, local microfactories, producing modular, lego-like building blocks that can be rapidly assembled on site, by anyone. Those factories can be set up for a fraction of the cost (in fact, many already exist), and don’t need to be tied to any one product, or even one market. It’s a highly scalable, flexible and resilient model. We call it Design for Distributed Manufacture & Assembly (or DfDMA).
It’s a kind of ‘Operation Dynamo’ for building in the UK, where, like the hundreds of small boats that rescued troops from Dunkirk, hundreds of local factories and businesses combine to collectively make hundreds of thousands of homes. Together, becoming a powerful force for sustainable, 21st century construction and sustaining thousands of jobs.
But this won’t happen on its own. There are too many barriers. For this distributed network to scale, it needs common standards, shared platforms to coordinate with each other. For components to be reusable, or carbon impacts assessed, they need to carry information about their history and status. We need to do the hard work to make it simple. We need to collaboratively develop shared, open source products, patterns and digital infrastructure. From factory controls to the ‘material passports’ that allow us to track the lifecycle of materials and components from forest, to factory to home. It might seem like nerdy, complicated stuff, but at the centre of it all is a simple, powerful idea: what if the future of construction is not one big thing – but many small things?
Meet the Team
