“The primary advantage every modular project has, if you do it right, is time savings,” said Mark Donahue—principal, design, for Lowney Architecture—during the “Offsite Evolved: How Today’s Prefab, Modular, and 3D-Printing Solutions Deliver Proven Speed, Savings, and Scale” panel at the ULI Fall Meeting in San Francisco. “You can, on a, say, 24-month construction project, save six to eight weeks.”
Furthermore, he said prefabrication offsite offers predictability: “You know what you’re getting before you get it.” The quality of construction can be much greater: “The factory environment is a much better place [for workers] to put things together than hanging off of a seven-story building.” And the results can be reproduced:
“Duplicatable results are going to lead to savings of time and money.”
These advantages also come with challenges, though. “The funding occurs much earlier in the process than with traditional [construction],” Donahue said, because the factory needs to buy the materials to get started. “That means you have to make decisions up front, and you have to stick by them. You could consider this a challenge or an advantage.” Transporting modular prefabricated sections from the factory to the site is another consideration. “You want to be able to put [the sections] on a truck in a way that’s not expensive to ship.”
Saving time, money with 3D printing
Gene Eidelman, cofounder, Azure Printed Homes Inc., said that he has seen significant cost savings from Azure’s methods of 3D-printing housing, as well as faster construction times. “I’ve been developing for more than 35 years, but I developed our process for automating construction three and a half years ago,” he said. “We see projects being done much faster, especially single-family projects. But also . . . every project we’ve won so far [has] generally come up 25, 30 percent less expensive.”
In addition to substantially reducing construction waste, 3D printing results in higher quality and greater fire resistance, according to Eidelman. One of Azure’s projects in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles survived the recent wildfires unscathed in an area where 45 homes burned.
Azure is busy with rebuilding projects in the burned areas, Eidelman said, pointing to the speed of 3D printing. “We offer quite a lot of customization,” he said. “It takes us one day to print. We also have a system where we do the outside of the building with light gauge steel. We do 1,500 square feet [140 sq m] a day, and then it takes three to four weeks to [finish it in the factory]. We deliver it, and then [it takes] a couple of days to install.”
Standardized systems reducing field costs
Volumetric modular construction—which involves builders prefabricating modules to create a complete building, LEGO-style—often does not deliver on the cost savings it promises, said Apoorva Pasricha, chief operating officer of Cloud Apartments. “What we found is that field costs really drive up the overall cost of modular,” she said. “About a third of the cost ends up being in the factory, and about two thirds end up being in the field.” Pasricha noted that Cloud recognized, for modular to create cost savings, “We need to focus on what’s happening in the field, and we need to flip the field to factory ratio.”
Cloud’s solution was to reduce field work to a minimum. “Cloud has spent a lot of time designing standardized systems—assembly systems for MEP, for the corridors, for roofing, for the façade—that can all be pushed into the factory, so that when you’re in the field, there’s minimal work that has to happen,” Pasricha said.
Cloud also chose not to become a general contractor but instead to work with existing factories, general contractors, and subcontractors. “Factories have struggled, historically—it takes a lot of consistent demand to make [them successful],” she said. Cloud serves as developer for projects and it partners with third-party developers.
Old-school developers, builders go modular
Ellen Morris, director of real estate development, Eden Housing Inc., said that most of Eden’s more than 170 properties are not modular: “We are the traditional old-school developer that works with lots of public agencies, lots of public funding—the whole arduous development process that modular is trying to break up and improve on.”
Eden partnered with Harbinger Homes to create Blue Oak Landing, 100 percent permanent supportive housing in Vallejo. “We chose to go modular because it was a business development opportunity with the city of Vallejo,” Pasricha said. “Harbinger was brand new to the city, and the founder is also the original CEO of Eden Housing.” In addition, the factory was a three-mile (5 km) drive from the project site, with no underpasses or highways.
For La Vista Apartments, 176 units of family housing in Hayward, Eden and its joint venture partner, The Pacific Companies, worked with Autovol, a volumetric modular factory. “Autovol’s process is almost entirely automated—it’s robots building in a factory with help from carpenters,” Pasricha said. “And so, these units were quite a bit less expensive to build.”
Employing modular construction requires some adjustment for traditional developers. “When we did our first modular project, one of the first things that became apparent is that the process is different—not only the method of construction, but to support that, we had to change the way we go about doing business,” said Randall Thompson, preconstruction executive for NibbiPrefab at Nibbi Brothers General Contractors. “We had to change what we do in preconstruction. We have to change how we interact with the project’s design team. The thing I like the most about it is the collaborative environment that it demands.”
In addition to bringing the design team on earlier in the process than with traditional construction methods, Thompson also recommends engaging with the manufacturers as soon as possible. “Every factory has something a little different about how they manufacture, or their supply chain, that can inform how you design or specify your product.”
The modular industry is still trying to gain its footing, Donahue acknowledged. “What we really want is for you to be able to order units like you’re going to Starbucks,” he said. “If I get one in Peoria, I’m getting the same thing that if I have in Fremont. Once it starts to mature to that level, we’re going to really see proliferation. We’re on the cusp of it.”
