Having easy access to long term pipeline (as advocated in the Construction Playbook) will of course help ensure there is less downtime.
“You're miles away from that if we don't get all of these other ecosystem elements in place to support it.”.Johnston recalls a bathroom pod project early in his own career, where the beautifully designed, millimetre-perfect pods had to be inserted into a traditionally built building.. Aiming for efficiency in such modular projects carries risk..
He says that far too much time was spent fixing the gaps between the manufactured and traditional parts.Whilst the insides of the pods were identical, the outside utility connections were different every single time.Johnston warns of the knock-on effects of these types of scenarios, where a lack of advanced planning results in a total loss of the intended value.. Marks agrees and says the solution lies in bringing the construction site build portion of projects up to the same accuracy as the modules.. Modular construction.
Bringing up the B2 Atlantic Yards project, Amy Marks explains that the problems caused by the module frames not being reset when needed is an easily fixable issue to learn from, not a reason to write off prefab altogether.. For example, lessons learned from the earlier Victoria Hall project in Wolverhampton (which saw tolerance issues between the modules and core structure of the building), did inspire a shift from concrete to structural steel frames on Atlantic Yards.. Further, while she believes it’s possible to achieve tolerances, she says that not every process (ie.every contract, every scope, every specification) is currently set up for accurate tolerances.
This needs to change, she says, or what we’re aiming to do will be nearly impossible.. “You can't have the same behaviour and think you're going to have some dramatically different result (that's going to be great) all of a sudden.’.
The reality is that making these changes offers a solution to many of the problems we’re facing as an industry at the moment, including poor productivity, low value, excessive amounts of waste, and carbon emissions.This rise in density is driving DCs to be all about the utilities, with processing space representing a very small percentage of each development.. With both a rapidly evolving technological marketplace and long project lead times, the same dilemma between customers and infrastructure builders about the timings of decision making is amplified..
The developer needs decisions as early as possible to design, secure power, step through regulatory hurdles and source long-lead components; while the customers want to be able to wait as long as possible to read the market.Maintaining optionality, speed and cost effectiveness is a problem requiring new solutions.. On top of these challenges there are further known unknowns in the picture: the impact of the move from training AI to the distribution of AI Quantum computing..
The power problem.This situation is unlikely to change.