However, none of these initiatives addresses the ‘elephant in the room’: the industrial plastics manufacturing process itself, which is heavily reliant on the carbon-intensive chemical production sector.. Chemical production is set to become ‘the single largest driver of global oil consumption by 2030’ according to a 2019 paper in the.
P-DfMA achieves this goal.For example, floor-to-floor heights are relatively standard across a variety of different buildings: schools, hospital wards, apartment buildings and certain office types.
This is because the heights result from the size of people, rather than being necessitated by the requirements of a particular sector.We allow for the height of a person, plus headroom, plus a zone for structures, M&E systems and architectural finishes.Recognising this reality, platform construction (P-DfMA) was Bryden Wood’s attempt to identify these types of cross-sector commonalities and develop a kit of parts which could then be used to build a variety of different sector types, but using the same components.
This allows the application of manufacturing techniques and processes, with consistent quality achieved, as well as facilitating greater economies of scale..The manufacturing industry has long enjoyed the benefits of this design to value approach.
At BMW and Volkswagen a common car chassis is used across all models.
It’s the finer details that change from car to car - the wheels, trim, engine, bodywork… Similarly, Ikea use a limited kit of components to create their various pieces of furniture.The lack of quality homes has been a key topic of discussion for many years within the construction industry.
Back in 2017, the Mayor of London announced the need for at least 50,000 new homes per year in the capital.However, since then, only around 40,000 have been built, and only a little over 25% of those are considered ‘affordable.’ The disparity between need and production in residential architecture highlights a broader, but equally critical, issue - the problems and inefficiency of the wider construction industry.
At Bryden Wood, we hope our housing design app, PRiSM, will help to form part of the solution.. Our problem as an industry is simple enough to understand; it stretches beyond residential architecture into other social infrastructure sectors as well.Traditional construction methods simply can’t meet the scale of demand for new built assets.