Page 32 - College Planning & Management, July/August 2018

Facilities CAMPUS SPACES
Today’s Prefab Construction
Personalized prefab is here. Really. Are you willing to try it?
BY BETSY MADDOX
JUST AS LEARNING IS BECOMING PERSONALIZED, so is prefabricated, or “prefab,” construction. Driven by technology, the new methods of prefab offer cost-effective custom spaces and a building process that helps address serious construction challenges facing the education industry.
Tech-driven prefab is a far cry from the prescribed, expensive, and inflexible whole rooms or pods (sometimes found in health- care and residence hall construction) that many equate with prefab. That more traditional prefab method requires very early decision making, as the prefab rooms or pods must be installed inside the project before the building enclosure is complete. In addition, the rest of the construction project must integrate with those rooms or pods, rather than the other way around. Hoists are typically required, the potential for injuries or damage is greater, and more site coordination is necessary. It fails to offer the flex- ibility most designers and clients require.
Today’s Options
Here, we focus on technology-driven, factory-manufactured prefab. This method sees the design, specification, pricing, manufacturing, delivery, and installation of a project all coordinated from one technology file. Clients see exactly what their space will look like and exactly how much it costs before building begins. All parts of a project are on a truck for delivery two to four weeks after the design is finalized, so decisions about the interior can be accommodated to the last minute—a boon for designers who constantly respond to and incorporate last-minute client- driven changes.
Pre-assembled, flat-stacked job components are brought to the project site. Modules are easily transported and installed, enhancing safety at the worksite. These solutions are DFD (design for disassem- bly) and offer a flexible system long after opening day. The process shrinks project schedules, curtails the demand on an already sparse labor pool, and gives the user exactly what they want.
A new CSI (Construction Specifications Institute) division, 134273–Integrated Interior Assemblies, recognizes this type of prefab construction and its associated output. Strictly for the interior, it allows a “warm shell” to be prepared onsite while the build-out is constructed off-site. Specific to that division, technol- ogy allows for complete customization of an entire interior build- out. That build-out could be a technology-enabled active learning classroom, a suite of administrative offices, a series of dry labs for data analysis, a makerspace, and/or whatever else is required.
This new prefab method is particularly beneficial to education
32 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / JULY/AUGUST 2018
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