Construction Innovation Hub

UK

Funded by the Government in 2018 with £72m from UK Research and Innovation’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, the Construction Innovation Hub brings together world-class expertise from BRE (Building Research Establishment), the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) at the University of Cambridge and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC).

The project’s aim is to drive collective innovation in modern methods of construction and act as a catalyst for the change needed for our built environment to deliver better outcomes for current and future generations.

The Construction Innovation Hub brings together world-class expertise to drive collective innovation in modern methods of construction.

Buro Happold was engaged to help develop an innovative platform approach to design for manufacture and assembly as the future of the construction industry.

The product platform will help to bring the wider industry and supply chain together around key principles of standardisation and interoperability.

Challenge

In collaboration with more than 300 organisations, industry bodies, policymakers, practitioners and academics, the Construction Innovation Hub is directly addressing the sector’s performance and productivity challenges.

Buro Happold was engaged to help develop an innovative platform approach to design for manufacture and assembly as the future of the construction industry. The Deployment Guide produced will form part of the Product Platform Rulebook.

The key target of the project is to achieve smoother systems for the industrialised delivery of construction for all governmental buildings – from council housing to schools, from ministerial offices to leisure centres, and everything in between. This requires an enormous push in standardisation of the process by which industrialised construction products are designed, specified and delivered to ensure different construction elements can be factory produced and assembled together on site with ease.

While platform construction systems are not entirely alien to UK construction, the industry lags far behind its peers in aerospace and automotive when it comes to adopting this approach at scale. The further focus of the project is on the development of a Value Toolkit, a suite of tools to empower clients and policymakers to make value-based procurement decisions that will result in improved environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Another key goal of the project is to drive the digital transformation of global construction and infrastructure.

Solution

The Hub’s Platform Programme team is working alongside industry and Government to define the need and establish a clear route for the industry to adopt a “kit of parts” approach, one that will enable construction firms to meet the evolving needs of future infrastructure – improving sector productivity while ensuring high standards of quality and performance.

The programme will produce the Platform Rulebook – an open-access series of key processes that, over time, will help to design-out common failures within construction manufacturing and assembly. This will not only improve safety, quality, cost-effectiveness and sustainability in the sector, but will also provide better outcomes for the end users.

A multidisciplinary team of experts from across Buro Happold has been working with architects Grimshaw and BAM Design to examine the overall principles of an effective platform construction system. Engagement will be conducted with the wider supply chain on this key design principle.

We developed a standardised framework that would be supplier-agnostic and realise a new level of interoperability for construction materials. The platform is sufficiently defined so that a design team can create a building that is compliant with the platform, without being a carbon copy of other buildings.

The supply chain can provide products that are fully compliant with the platform and a set of standardised interfaces. This approach speeds up construction, while also making it more robust, efficient, resilient and sustainable.

The Product Platform Rulebook published for consultation in May 2022, contains guidance to enable market players to develop their own product platforms.

Value

The processes, as outlined in the Product Platform Rulebook and infrastructure guide will help to bring the wider industry and supply chain together around key principles of standardisation.

Buro Happold’s multidisciplinary capability delivers the breadth and depth of consultancy needed around the requirements of a platform system for the construction industry. We have a strong industrialised construction vision, which we have been able to bring to the project to help realise the acceleration of modern methods of construction, as well as shining a spotlight on the key issue of how the design teams and the supply chain engage in the process of industrialising the sector.