“Many a civil engineer is amazed: modular construction should bring modernization
Living room, kitchen and bathroom arrive on heavy trucks. The rooms are almost fully equipped, with a kitchenette, shower, sockets, tiles and wallpaper. On the construction site, they are placed next to and on top of each other like Lego bricks with the help of a crane. In no time at all, a multi-storey building with umpteen residential units is almost ready to move into.
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The industry calls the method serial or modular construction. “Some civil engineers are amazed,” says Andreas Göbel, manager at the Dutch-Japanese modular construction group Daiwa House. “But our modular buildings are absolutely secure, even in wind and vibrations from earthworks, tested by German structural engineers.”
It is true that in Germany only five percent of the buildings are modular. But the industry speaks of a boom. Building, it is said, can now become faster, cheaper and more sustainable. The building materials could be recycled and used in new modules. Such promises also inspire politicians. The Conference of Building Ministers is committed to simplifying the building laws of the federal states in favor of serial building.
industrialization of construction
For Daiwa House, this is an eagerly awaited signal. According to its own statements, the group is the seventh largest construction group in the world and the largest provider of modular buildings – but it is a newcomer in Germany. In Bochum he built the “Community Campus” student residence. And in Fürstenwalde, east of Berlin, the company is currently building a new module factory. From autumn of this year, 2,500 building parts per year are to be built in the halls. According to the company, the capacity will then gradually increase to between 15,000 and 20,000 units.
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According to the industry, the industrialization of the construction process is overdue. For thousands of years, building a house has been carried out in an archaic sequence of trades. “Normally, the shell comes, then the various expansion stages follow. In fact, there are always delays. The process is constantly being replanned and the costs have to be recalculated,” says Jutta Albus, junior professor for resource-efficient construction at the Technical University of Dortmund .
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But she also criticizes the modular strategy. “What has been built so far seems monotonous and unimaginative,” she complains. There is a risk that the booming modular construction will become slab 2.0 if it is planned without imagination and without considering people’s needs. Albus also cites award-winning, aesthetically pleasing examples with high utility value, including designs from her working group and the “Woodie” student residence in Hamburg, which a timber module builder from Styria completed in 2017. It is the largest wooden modular building in Europe and has partly projecting and overhanging blocks of flats.
transportation and automation
In addition to the architecture, transport is also a challenge in modular construction. Depending on the distance, it can be very expensive and also limits the possible dimensions of the modules that ultimately have to fit on a transporter.
For the future, the industry is striving to advance the automation of module production, not least to counteract the shortage of skilled workers. So far, according to Daiwa manager Göbel, a lot has been done by hand, in the Fürstenwalde Daiwa factory hall, for example, the assembly of the fitted kitchens and the laying of the screed.
In Japan, the industry is much further along, reports Göbel. There, robots weld steel girders together, mill holes in the walls for sockets and close joints. The living elements move automatically on mobile platforms from one work station to the next. Each module is given a QR code and the materials used can be traced back, like the egg to the chicken farm. It is still unclear when the high-tech factories will also become standard in Europe.
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