Where the market will pay for it, developers are adopting commercial techniques. They outflank the crafts crisis, but you need real skill to maximise the speed and quality advantages.
Part of the industry acknowledges that the way in which it builds houses needs to change, but making the move from craft-based traditions and wet trades to prefabrication and dry-fix techniques means squaring up to a series of challenges involving site operatives, professionals and consultants, build processes and materials.

Starting with housebuilding’s people, the present process of housebuilding has too much overlap in project management at professional level and makes too little investment in people on site, says Dr Linda Clarke, of the University of Westminster’s Westminster Business School. “It is difficult to introduce innovation in the current employment conditions. The industry needs to be directly employing people and it needs a broader skilling process,” she says.

“UK housebuilding is based on bodging, with each trade covering up for the trade before. But with prefabrication you can’t afford to make mistakes. You need people who are highly trained.” Clarke’s perceptions are based on her current involvement in a research project, for the DETR and EPSRC, on the subject of standardisation and skills, which compares and contrasts social housing projects in Britain, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.

Clarke’s research has brought her into contact with some examples of innovation on British housebuilding sites, and observed how the odds on success are currently stacked against it. “We saw cassette flooring being used on a project. Because the bricklayers were on price work they were not prepared to work to the tolerances needed. Prefabrication needs much greater precision. The price system does not encourage that,” she says.

But the same housebuilders that are using age-old methods and work practices to develop houses are now adopting advanced technology for brownfield urban apartment schemes. Researchers are also looking at how to make the inside of a home as flexible and adaptable as fitting out an office.

It is the commercial building sector with its concrete frames and curtain walling that is providing the technology and the skills for urban apartment schemes. In Manchester Crosby Homes (North West) is seeking planning permission to develop a 19-storey glass-clad tower, designed by Ian Simpson Architects. In the capital, The Peabody Trust has used terracotta tile to clad volumetric apartment units on site at its Murray Grove scheme in Hackney. At Montevetro in Battersea, Taylor Woodrow Capital Developments has a concrete frame building clad in terracotta and glass in a Richard Rogers Partnership concept design that takes commercial development technology transfer to the limit. London housebuilder Furlong Homes also clad its concrete framed Monza Building in Wapping, in terracotta.

Terracotta is proving to be one of the most popular of the new cladding options for residential buildings. That is because it offers an aesthetic advantage in its natural clay colouring, which is both appeasing to planners and reassuring to homebuyers. Furlong Homes specified German Eisenberg Terracotta Facades’ rainscreen system, available in the UK from distributor Telling Group. The system is based on a standard 400 mm by 200 mm tile, 30 mm thick, fitted into an aluminium framework. Tiles are secured by clips fixed to aluminium T-sections.

At the Monza Building the cladding’s clean industrial look is complemented by aluminium windows and balconies, in a design concept that originated with hi-tech architect Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners and was carried through by executive architect Reading & West. The specification of terracotta cladding was governed by aesthetics rather than a desire to innovate or shave time off the build programme for the seven-storey, 20-unit apartment block “Although it is quick to install, the design of tile is a lot less forgiving than brick,” says Andrew Wiseman, chief executive of Furlong Homes. “So we constructed the concrete frame, surveyed it, and then designed the cladding to fit.”

But could it win over one-time brickie, Furlong Homes’ chairman Jim Furlong. “I was not keen on it to start with,” he says, “but now I quite like it.”

Fast-track fit-out comes to homebuilding

If homes could be fitted out like offices it could transform not only the homebuilding but also the homebuying process, by enabling customers to have a far greater choice about the internal design of their homes. A major industry research project is dedicated to demonstrating how open building systems technology could be applied in UK housing. Objective of the project, called Meeting customer needs through standardisation and backed by EPSRC and DETR, is to come up with a flexible, adaptable fit-out solution that can be slotted into any form of home, whether new build or refurbishment, brick or concrete, houses or apartments, and whether for private buyer or social tenant. “Most of the housebuilding industry’s research initiatives are not ambitious enough,” says James Barlow, of Sussex University’s SPRU which is leading the research with the Logistics Systems Dynamics Group of Cardiff University. “There is a need to think more about the customer, because housebuilders are going to find it more difficult to sell the standard project and more difficult to play the land market. They will need to be building a product that is more in tune with what people want.” Partners in the research project include homebuilder Wilcon Homes and affordable developer Southern Housing Group, architect PRP, contractor Willmott Dixon Housing, open building company Infill Systems and other suppliers Hepworth Building Products, Redland Roofing Systems, NuAire, and Central Data Control. One year into the three-year project, the team has already looked at the theory, and is now set to put it into practice next year in a number of schemes. Southern Housing Group is set to give the technology its first test on site.

Source

Building Homes