Speed, Convenience, Affordability: Why Modular Construction Is Catching On

Architects often say that limitations force a designer to be more creative. A tight budget, scarce materials, or a difficult building site can push an architect to new ideas and innovative forms.

In the case of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, the architects at Shepley Bulfinch dealt with a constraint that is probably new to most designers: Would parts of that building fit on an 18-wheeler and pass safely under bridges on the freeway?

The Life Lab, a new feature on Harvard University’s innovation campus in the nearby neighborhood of Allston, was built in sections — each 11 feet wide, 44 feet long, and nearly 13 feet tall — in a warehouse near Lancaster, Pa. It was then shipped section by section to Massachusetts, where construction workers assembled the pieces on the building site and literally bolted them together. The building is meant to be permanent, but should Harvard ever want to move the lab, construction workers could loosen the bolts, transfer the pieces to another site, and put it back together again.

The lab building houses a series of workspaces for students, faculty, or alumni who are working on entrepreneurial ideas. Luke A. Voiland, a principal at Shepley Bulfinch, says the approach was meant to match the kind of innovation happening in the offices and lab benches inside.

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“It creates a narrative around a set of ideas — a new way of functioning,” he says. “How do we do it faster and get this thing up and running?”

Colleges often build for the ages, usually with heavy stone structures that sit in place for decades, if not centuries. The Life Lab represents a kind of building often seen in Europe and Asia but rarely used in the United States: modular construction. It’s a method that can have some advantages in flexibility, sustainability, and cost — a method that was long envisioned by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller as a way of scaling up good design.

“There has always been this dream in architecture of the perfect modular thing, going back to the Usonian houses and such,” says Voiland, referring to Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of creating homes with easy-to-assemble modular blocks. However, technology now allows people to model and customize forms to build unique structures with modular techniques. Voiland is quick to point out that Harvard’s Life Lab is nothing like the modular kitchen-cabinet layouts popularized by IKEA.

“Sometimes when I talk to people about this building, they ask, ‘Did you start with a catalog?’ No, no!” he says. “This is 100 percent a custom building. The only thing we were limited by is what you can ship on the roads. The dimensions of these boxes were driven by the shortest bridges between here and Pennsylvania.”

Modular construction comes in a range of styles and levels of quality. People in the industry often divide it into two categories: permanent modular construction, like Harvard’s Life Lab, and relocatable buildings, like the trailerlike classrooms parked behind overcrowded schools. But all modular buildings share a common construction technique: They are consistently built in a factory, often far from the land where they will sit. In the case of the Life Lab, the building components were constructed by NRB, a Canadian-American modular builder with a manufacturing facility in New Holland, Pa. The building sections were constructed one by one — complete with utilities and interior walls — and stored in a large building, much like an airplane hangar. The company put those pieces together in Pennsylvania to make sure everything fit, then deconstructed the building and shipped it to Cambridge. There, a crane lowered the components onto a prepared foundation within a matter of days.

Because the pieces of the building and its foundation could all be built at the same time, the 15,000-square-foot Life Lab was finished in seven months — about half the time traditional construction might take.

That speed is one of the key benefits of modular building, particularly when it comes to residence halls. In 2011, Appalachian State University built a 97,000-square-foot dormitory with the help of a company called Hunter Saak Modular, finishing it a year earlier than a traditional structure could have been built. Completing the building early meant that the university was able to get 460 students into those residences, and start drawing revenue for room and board, a year earlier.

Nothing about Appalachian State’s dormitory would indicate that it is a modular building. It’s a traditional three-story structure, clad in red bricks and topped with a green metal roof. Paul Forte, vice chancellor for business affairs, says that modular construction also allowed the university to build for about a third of the cost of traditional university housing. He expects the building to last 40 years, as long as the residence hall it replaced, but modular buildings can be built to last much longer than that.

Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute, a trade association representing the industry, says modular buildings are not necessarily less costly than traditional structures — particularly if the building is a custom construction, as most college buildings are.

But the factory-built setting offers other benefits besides an accelerated construction schedule: The building materials and components are sheltered from the weather, which reduces the opportunity for damage and mold growth during construction. The workers are also protected from rain, snow, winds, and other factors that can make construction outside dangerous. That controlled environment can also lead to more accurate and efficient construction techniques.

Modular construction could also be a solution for institutions that want to expand. It could allow hospitals, for example, to add floors to their buildings with minimal disturbance to the patients in the building below. It can solve the “swing space” problem — the temporary need for additional space during the renovation of a building. In 2014, Shepley Bulfinch designed a modular dining facility for the Harvard Business School to use while the university tore down and built a new permanent dining hall. After the renovation was complete, the modular building was disassembled and sold to Emory University, where it served a similar purpose.

Modular building in the United States, however, still lags far behind that of other countries. In Japan and Sweden, for example, modular construction dominates the residential market and is also commonly used for commercial construction. European and Asian countries have embraced a manufacturing approach to construction, and building off-site uses space more efficiently in those crowded countries.

Only about 3 percent of commercial buildings in the United States are modular, but the industry hopes that figure will grow to 5 percent by 2020, Hardiman says. “Education is one of those top, key markets for us,” he says. But the industry faces challenges beyond the perception that “modular” means temporary, shoddy buildings. In the United States, building trades are siloed and controlled by unions, which often seek to prevent construction from moving off site.

In the case of the Life Lab, Voiland says that Shepley Bulfinch was careful to work with a unionized work force on the project. In Boston, where unions are powerful, “no one wanted to have a problem with that,” he says. The firm also had to make special arrangements with local building-inspection agencies to allow a third-party inspector to assess the construction at the factory in Pennsylvania.

Modular buildings may someday be more common on college campuses, but as an industry, construction is slow to embrace change. Contractors like to keep all of their workers on site, where they can control the process. And everyone worries about liability. The history of construction is full of materials and techniques that were once thought to be safe but later turned out not to be.

Architects and builders “think about asbestos when they think about new stuff,” Voiland says. The Food and Drug Administration can approve a medical device in three to seven years, while the construction industry takes about 20 years to adopt a new material or technique.

“That’s how conservative the building industry is.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.