The UK is facing a severe housing crisis, with a chronic shortage of affordable and sustainable homes, rising property prices, and a growing population that outstrips supply. Although the planning system is a key culprit, it is also true that traditional construction methods are not helping with their long build times, lack of improvement in productivity and often uneven quality. However, whilst volumetric construction can do nothing to cut the Gordian knot of planning process, they do offer a quicker, safer, more sustainable alternative to the traditional style bricks and mortar.
Volumetric construction involves producing entire three-dimensional modules of a building in a factory. These sections are often fully finished with interiors, including walls, floors, ceilings, plumbing, and electrical systems. Such an innovative approach offers numerous advantages over conventional construction, including speed, efficiency, quality, aesthetics, and sustainability. In this blog post, we will explore how volumetric construction could help to solve the housing crisis.
Speed and Efficiency
One of the main benefits of volumetric construction is that it reduces the time required to build a home by up to 50%, according to a recent report by the (now renamed) Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. With volumetric construction you can have parallel workstreams - whilst the units are being constructed in a factory, the site can be prepared. The factory environment also helps boost productivity – it can take just 10 days to complete a unit, 90% fitted out and ready for delivery. With navigating the planning system already a time consuming part of the delivery of homes, such speed offers a quicker deployment of homes to meet rising demand.
With volumetric construction, homes are constructed in a bespoke factory setting and then delivered to the site ready to be slotted into their space by cranes. This controlled factory environment can save costs with economies of scale and allows assembly to be carried out to millimetre-precise tolerances. Furthermore, the reduced construction time also lowers financing costs, which can be significant in traditional building projects.
Quality and Aesthetics
The term "volumetric construction" may not sound appealing to consumers used to more traditionally constructed houses. However, the reality is that factory production provides a high quality product with rigorous quality control measures. Whilst volumetric construction is a relative newcomer to the scene, it is unlikely that it will produce the high profile failures we have seen in the past with affordable tower blocks having to be demolished or expensively refurbished.
The concept of "volumetric homes" also suggests a dull uniformity, with no place for individualist expression. Counterintuitively, though, each volumetric unit is designed specifically for the space available in each building. This allows for the most effective layouts to be achieved on unique floor plates, maximising space and efficiency. The system allows flexible architecture and apartment layouts, which in turn means volumetric construction can unlock the viability of the most constrained and busy sites. The units can be put together with different claddings, materials and finishes. Interior fixtures and fittings consonant with different tastes and budgets can also be incorporated to create unique structures – a potential buyer or renter will just not realise that their new home will have been built many miles away, transported to site and then hoisted into place, like so many Lego blocks.
Sustainability
Sustainability is also a key consideration in finding ways of addressing the housing crisis. The construction industry has historically been a major contributor to carbon emissions and environmental degradation. Volumetric construction offers several sustainability benefits that align with the UK's goals for reducing its carbon footprint and promoting green building practices. Construction in a bespoke factory setting reduces waste and emissions. Computer aided manufacturing can produce a more accurate end product with which human workers cannot compete. As the units arrive on site almost fully completed, vehicle movements are substantially reduced, which results in less noise, dust and transport emissions. There may also be a greater capacity for recycling or repurposing leftover materials.
Volumetric housing units can have energy efficiency designed in, with high-quality insulation, energy-efficient windows, and advanced heating and cooling systems, reducing energy consumption and lower utility costs for homeowners, which is especially important for affordable housing.
Croydon - an example of volumetric success
London has seen a number of buildings go up in the past few years using volumetric construction. In Croydon there has been a particular hive of activity with Europe’s tallest volumetric tower at 163-metres high and the first co-living asset class approved by the Greater London Authority (GLA) under the London Plan having recently been constructed there by Tide Construction and delivered using its volumetric manufacturing arm, Vision. The College Road scheme comprises two interconnected towers, one of 35 storeys providing 120 affordable homes, and the other a 50 storey building with 817 co-living homes operated as Outpost Management Ltd’s Enclave: Croydon Build to Rent scheme.
At College Road, Tide managed to cut traditional construction times by 40% and achieve a 28-month construction programme. The efficiency of Vision’s offsite volumetric technology meant Tide were able to install 1,725 volumetric units in 40 weeks. Volumetric construction also enabled the full potential of this constrained site of only 2,000 m2 to be fully unlocked.
The development also stands alongside another award-winning Tide volumetric development in Croydon, Greystar’s Ten Degrees Build to Rent scheme, which was the world's first volumetric building of over 40 storeys. Ten Degrees compromises a 135-metre tower containing 546 high quality apartments across 44 floors and was constructed on a highly constrained 0.2ha brownfield site – next to London’s third busiest station and hemmed in by bus and tram lines. Ten Degrees was built in just over two years, while the construction time using traditional methods would have likely taken twice as long. Volumetric delivery also resulted in a 40% embodied carbon reduction on the project (compared to RIBA BAU and LETI Band E benchmarks) – through less waste, fewer vehicle movements, and the highly efficient, bespoke structural units.
Conclusion
The causes of Britain's housing crisis are many and varied, and will take much governmental will and industry commitment to resolve. Volumetric housing, nevertheless should play a valuable part. It offers high quality, efficient units, which can be more easily and quickly deployed to complex sites. For developers, the rapidity of construction means that borrowing costs are lower, and neighbourhood opposition is likely to be less. The Labour government has set an ambitious target of 1.5 million homes over the next five years; volumetric construction may be a part of getting this done.
