Founder of ADL Ventures and Fraunhofer at MIT | Creating HardTech Ventures at the Corporate Start-up Interface | Expert in Industrialized Construction & ClimateTech | Senior R&D Leader, Board Member & Serial Entrepreneur
Innovative strides in offsite construction, like those from Connect Homes or Volumetric Building Companies, often stem from creative design adaptations to existing supply chains and transportation infrastructure. 💡 Inspired by W.J. Mencarow's provocatively titled blog, A Horse’s Ass Designed the Space Shuttle, we are reimagining how constraints shape the construction landscape. Mencarow's unconventional link between the Space Shuttle's dimensions and ancient Roman roads underscores the importance of rethinking constraints. This got us thinking of a creative idea.. 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐛𝐲 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐰𝐚𝐲? Norfolk Southern and two other railroads have double high clearance railways in the area where our IOC Engine project is proposed. But that is just one thing we need to take a close look at… 🧐 Now that we're talking about it, consider this: What legacy infrastructure limitations could be transformed through offsite solutions? 🤔 #IndustrializedConstruction #OffsiteConstruction #InfrastructureTransformation Ken Semler Rob Howard Ben Hershey Gary Fleisher Doug Tollin Daniel Small, Steve Burrows Tom Hardiman, Ryan E. Smith Colby Swanson Dafna Kaplan Vaughan Buckley Gon Zifroni Joel Hutchines Santiago Ossa Stacey Rothgeb John Fay Brian Gaudio Arash Shekari Piotr Kowalski Ignasi Pérez Arnal John A. Provo Ryan Colker Audree Grubesic Paul Richards Brent Musson Alon Kessler Charles Leahy
Jared Levy
5mo
When we started Connect Homes, we knew we needed to tackle one of the main stumbling blocks in the industry - logistics. The industry standard (think Clayton Homes here) is to use the largest module that can go down a roadway. Why? Because the bigger the module, the more efficient it is to build in the factory. So if it becomes cost prohibitive to deliver these homes more than 300 miles from a factory (it does) then they set up a new factory to serve a new market. That would not be sustainable for us as a startup. We looked at the intermodal shipping network and recognized that there is a global network already in place to move big things cost effectively. Go just about anywhere in the world and you can get a container there. Our most important discovery was that the shipping container wasn't the key, it was the network. In fact, when you modify a shipping container to use as a building module, with the changes that are made, it can no longer ship on the intermodal network. Back to Vaughan's point, there are still many stumbling blocks in fully utilizing the intermodal network for housing.
Paul Richards
5mo
Continued: some benefits, Platform uses others to make sections or components for you, “kits” I managed to get the supply chain using the same materials methods and digital programs, it took a good few years but I had the work and they wanted it, so we grew. My factory continued making the bespoke builds but the supply chain manufacturerd 80% and that was in the 90’s, the process never had a name back then but when the UK government’s research program started, I was spokesperson for the international design team that forged the term “Platform”.
Paul Richards
5mo
This is why I championed The Platform approach, not because I’m trying to be clever it’s because British roads are full of issues, I regularly took out cables and street signs and a bus stop, transporting large building products, even worse when we had previous walked the route things had been built or grown that made delivery unnecessarily stressful, 1 job in London was all good until we neared site and the neighbours panicked and refused access, I had teams of guys that do one thing turn and look at you! They don’t need to say a word I know exactly what they want to say, and I bet everyone who has experienced that knows, we have to become diplomats in a heartbeat, most of the neighbours were ok but the imidate guy wasn’t budging, f***er! but you will always find a solution, “if something can go wrong it probably will” in the UK back in the 80’s I had to build volumetric, then try and disassemble for transport, you get used to it and create sections that suit your team’s onsite, that worked for over a decade, until my factory manager came to me and said there is another way, I eventually tried it I was extremely reluctant and everyone reading this knows why, but I gave it a go, the first build wasn’t brilliant but I could see
Piotr Kowalski
5mo
Good point, but there always remains that last mile part of the delivery, doesn’t it?
Dave Clevenger
5mo
There is a lot of technology shift to remedy this problem… some of us are innovating. In fact it’s even in the name.
Diana Coote
5mo
Yep! Flat-packed, panelized modular can be shipped via rail, road, or air. When you think outside the volumetric box, there are many options to get the product to the site.
It's always about the last mile when shipping but I've a solution for that ....
CEO @ Volumetric Building Companies | Global Modular Platform
5moNolan, we dug pretty deep in to this. The roadblock we found: The American Association of Railroads publishes documents which the insurance companies universally use to allow/prohibit insurance on certain cargo types. Fully assembled homes or parts thereof are prohibited, for somewhat simple reasons - houses aren't designed to transport via rail and can fall apart due to vibration. However, modular components were never properly assessed and therefore fall under this exclusion. So... Why not change the publication? Anecdotally, the last time this was done was to move oversize transformers which were previously prohibited. Apparently this was spearheaded by IBEW and took nearly a decade to accomplish. Once we understood it took an organization as influential as IBEW 10 years to make change, we gave up... Feel free to take the baton!