OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION
plumbing systems – in the offsite warehouse each plumber installed 600 ft of pipe per day, an increase of 300% over conventional construction work.
Design and build project in Columbus
NBBJ participated in a second prefabricated ‘offsite’ project at the Institute of Neurosciences at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. This 400,000 ft2
hospital has nine floors, and
224 private rooms. Here, NBBJ worked with the contractor, Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., under a design and build contract. In this second project, there were several improvements, including the entire team of architects, engineers, and contractors, working from the same office for two years. They developed the entire project in a single 3D BIM model, and the contractor the construction sequencing models in 4D BIM, to plot the operation of the prefabricated warehouse, and the production, storage, and loading areas for the components.
On this project, it was decided to assemble, deliver, and install, the modular components using a ‘just in time’ strategy – necessitating a very precise construction sequence between the prefabricated warehouse and the construction site. For example, all the prefabricated components for the third floor were completed in the ‘offsite’ warehouse at the same time as the structural work was being undertaken.
The positioning, in the corridors, of the racks housing the MEP components (Figs. 3 & 4) was also improved, as they were located more accurately with GPS technology. The transportation of the prefabricated bathrooms to site was also improved via the construction of a special load elevator. Both hospitals had a unique design, and required very complex construction systems. Both projects are excellent examples of how offsite construction can not only work well for traditional repetitive components, but also for highly customised products.
A healthcare example of offsite ‘volume manufacturing’
The aforementioned NBBJ examples demonstrate pioneering custom fabrication of specific components of healthcare buildings in the US, but how can an entire healthcare facility be
prefabricated in a factory and subsequently rapidly
assembled on site? BLOX is an
Figure 8: A single 15x15x60ft ‘manufactured chassis’ called ‘UBER’ was able to host a series of different built elements for a healthcare facility that was built in 14 weeks (Source: BLOX).
26 Health Estate Journal August 2019
Figure 7: A 15x15x60ft ‘prefab’ module manufactured by BLOX is transported to the job site.
offsite design and manufacturing company that is committed to answering this question in healthcare. It was founded in 2010 by Chris Giattina, an architect that directed the Giattina Aycock Architecture Studio from Alabama. In the 2000s he was designing training facilities for Honda and Kia, which introduced him to manufacturing methods used by car manufacturers. He founded BLOX in an attempt to apply these lessons into the design and manufacture of medical building components. Today, BLOX has a 250,000 ft2
manufacturing facility in
Bessemer, Alabama, and is one of the US leaders in manufacturing entire walls, rooms, and buildings, for healthcare clients.
Manufacturing platforms One of the big challenges of
‘manufacturing construction’ is to balance customisation and standardisation. A big lesson can be found in car manufacturing. Most car manufacturers do not design and
build a car from scratch; the majority of vehicles are built using similar ‘car platforms’, which share parts such as the chassis, tools, and production processes, across models and brands. For example, today it is standard practice for different models of brands such as Renault and Nissan to use a similar chassis and components, which helps reduce development and production costs, simplifies inventory management, increases quality, and shares innovation.
Architectural thinking for offsite manufacture: standardisation Chris Giattina says that with offsite manufacturing architects need to ‘focus more on the programme’ –the parts that make a building. He believes architects need to find means to analyse the variation of a particular programme type and find opportunities to reduce that design variation to standards that could guide a more rational manufacturing process. He says: “We need a fundamental mindshift, starting by first understanding what the programme is. Once we understand the programme, we need to learn and detect how to remove unnecessary variation, and finally, once unnecessary variation is removed, we can begin to standardise. Then we can create interchangeable parts, which allows us to build a supply chain that can work at many different levels efficiently.” (Hoover and Snyder, 2018).7
Chris Giattina began to develop his design- manufacturing thinking in the work he did for Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), one of his biggest clients. HCA has over 250 hospitals in 20 US states and the UK. HCA had robust design standards, but in every hospital the programme was reinterpreted in different ways. He and his team began to map the configuration of each
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