Alastair Powell.
It’s a somewhat odd situation considering that the construction industry is inherently a collaborative one.Every asset we build requires many different parties to work together, but when the projects end, people go their separate ways as competitors.
Although that’s all fine and good, ultimately it means we aren’t taking learnings forwards from one project to another.Things aren’t being effectively fed back or built upon, and so we aren’t seeing the beneficial changes we desire.Sully believes it’s this lack of considered collaboration, and the need to overcome such issues, which is ultimately responsible for the lack of government funding we’ve seen, despite long-standing acknowledgement of the problems..
Things began to shift when the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), and some of the large industry players, began to talk about how we could start to work together to be more effective.Bryden Wood’s efforts to develop P-DfMA processes and strategies utilising platform construction and manufacturing approaches have helped to facilitate an understanding of the ways we might achieve our desired goals.. P-DfMA and The Ministry of Justice.
Bryden Wood’s previous work with the first iterations of platform construction for the Ministry of Justice formed an early step on the P-DfMA path.
Trudi Sully was involved with the effort to bring manufacturing into that process as part of her work with the MTC.The complexity of architecture, engineering and building technologies has increased exponentially in recent decades, distorting how buildings are designed, constructed and even conceived.
In parallel, architecture has become acutely, myopically object-oriented, celebrating the product rather than the process.In unison, these routes have led the discipline into a service-centered approach, one that seeks to hastily resolve problems rather than solve them holistically, carefully and analytically.. What if we look past the hospital building and see the journeys of a thousand patients, past the factory and reflect on the launch of a lifesaving treatment, past the data centre and muse upon the millions of connected people.. Design to Value explores just that.. Much design practice has reacted to complexity through specialisation to make it feel more ‘manageable’ – fracturing the building process by elevating expertise.
Today, rarely does an architect oversee the entire building process, from analysis to aesthetics, engineering to construction.Yet architects have a unique capacity to critically understand and engage with the myriad stakeholders involved in a design process – and those who will ultimately use building and be affected by its presence.