August 2023CONSTRUCTIONBUSINESSREVIEW.COM8IN MYOPINIONBy Moad ZIADI, Director of Construction Projects, Unibail-Rodamco-WestfieldHOW OFFSITE CONSTRUCTION BRING SOLUTIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS?Offsite construction, even if it is part of the Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), remains an old technology which at the latest had emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. In the United States, some real estate companies started selling `Kit houses' in the 1900s. The associated technology and its own standards framework were the embryo of what we now call modern offsite construction.This technology takes many forms, ranging from a 3-dimensional module such as prefabricated hotel bathrooms or student bedroom modules to simple elements such as precast slabs, masonry blocks or even non-structural assemblies and sub-assemblies such as electrical boards or mechanical boxes.The objective of this technology, at the beginning of the last century, was to find solutions to build quickly and guarantee better or at least identical quality to the classical construction method.In fact, the offsite construction had a spectacular boom in Europe after the Second World War and this technology success was maintained more than two decades after to build more housing for about 1 million Pieds-Noirs evacuated from Algeria to mainland France. The baby boom, population growth and successive waves of foreign workers have maintained the shortage of housing demand and pushed the offsite construction industry to keep developing in France and generally in Europe.Today, it should be reminded that the volume of the offsite construction industry - according to a report performed by McKinsey - will reach a size of 130 billion dollars by 2030 in Europe and the United States.It is then time for all the actors, project owners, architects, engineers, and contractors to start organizing themselves to take useful advantage of this developing industry and ensure that this opportunity will not be missed especially on the aspects related to sustainability.In fact, climate change and the challenges of sustainability have today given rise to a new virtue in offsite construction, that of reducing the carbon footprint and reducing the energy consumed by buildings.Moad ZIADI
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