THE DASH FOR OFFSITE

Last year I submitted a proposal to the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 which sought to investigate the use of what I termed the ‘Onsite Assembly Line’. Eventually I hope the term OSAL will become widespread! The research idea centred around the need to challenge the current trend towards offsite construction and ask if this is really the right answer for delivering buildings. The following extract is taken from my proposal, and provides an overview to my thinking around the theme of Manufacturing a Modern City:

UK government is being encouraged to support the use of prefabrication in the construction industry in a way that replicates other types of factory-based manufacturing, such as car production. The recently commissioned report ‘Delivery Platforms for Government Assets’ for Digital Built Britain highlighted this: “there is increasingly wide acceptance that design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) in construction will yield significant benefits in terms of time and cost savings, whilst increasing productivity, quality and safety”.

There is a need to challenge the widespread and growing perception throughout the industry and government agencies that construction efficiency can only be improved by embracing off-site methods of pre-fabrication. Whilst these can bring benefits, such methods have the disadvantage of requiring significant associated infrastructure - including the building of pre-fabrication factories, and the means of transporting very large components from those factories through urban areas to site. Such infrastructure will require significant investment – creating future inflexibility, limiting design opportunity and scope for change. 

However, rapid improvements in automated systems and digital technology are significantly reducing costs such that there is now the ability to produce deployable automation and robotics as we are seeing with drones, self-driving cars and farming equipment. This suggests digital technology can allow manufacturing to move to a distributed model. Instead of relying on large scale static factories, we should be introducing small-scale, local, deployable automated systems that can be moved between sites.

The construction industry should not fall into the trap of trying to replicate ideas that are already becoming outdated. A key goal of Beyond the Ceiling is to challenge the perception that construction efficiency can only be improved by embracing methods of off-site pre-fabrication. My research aims to investigate the use of deployable automation and assembly line thinking within the construction site itself. The thinking associated with a DfMA approach should not be limited to an off-site construction model. By applying some of the key ideas of DfMA to an automated on-site approach the advantages of off-site construction could be achieved, whilst potential problems avoided – particularly in relation to transportation and reduced initial investment.

With Onsite assembly I’m postulating that many techniques used to organise factories could be more closely embedded within sites and that the deliveries to site are made as efficient as possible by keeping to small component sizes with maximum packing density. This is a subject that I will continue to investigate over a series of blogs.

 

Notes:

Design, BuildDan Cash