Robert Lombardelli is a Chartered Surveyor and Senior Partner at Robert Lombardelli Partnership, A multidisciplinary practice of Quantity Surveyors, Building Surveyors and Project Managers now celebrating its 22nd year.
He has been involved in off site fabrication techniques since 1982 when the first collaboration of RLP and Levitt Bernstein.
Interest in the application of low volume modular construction to housing led to the development of construction and contract methodology which resulted in Caspar 2 in Leeds, Harlow and Redbridge Foyers, and the LiveIn Quarters modules shown at this years Ideal Home Exhibition.
23. John Miles, a Main Board Director of Arup Group, a Director of The Housing Forum, and a commissioner for CABE, speaking at The Pre-Fabulous Home.
24. Homing in on Excellence - a commentary on the use of offsite fabrication methods for the UK housebuilding industry, The Housing Forum, London, 2002, page 25.
25. Robert Lombardelli, Senior Partner at Robert Lombardelli Partnership, speaking at The Pre-Fabulous Home.
26. Simon Allford, Partner at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, speaking at The Pre-Fabulous Home.
27. Homing in on Excellence, page 61.
28. Simon Allford, speaking.
29. Simon Allford, speaking.
30. John Miles, speaking.
31. Simon Allford, speaking.
32. John Miles, speaking.
Simon Allford is a founder and Partner of the architectural practice Allford Hall Monaghan Morris in 1989.
Simon is a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He is a visiting critic and external examiner at a number of schools including the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Liverpool University, Mackintosh School of Architecture and the RIBA external candidate programme.
He is an adviser to the RIBA on competitions and education, the Student Medals for Architecture, and on works to the listed premises. He has judged a number of international competitions for the RIBA and other bodies.
The Pre-Fabulous Home Continued from page 3
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The OSF house is going to be far more functional, whether it takes an urban or a rural form, which might suggest that it is not house builders at all who are going to invest most forcefully in housing manufacturing. The utilities companies and the telecoms industry have perhaps most to gain by teaming up with the automotive industry to solve the mounting housing crisis of undersupply and an ageing stock. As John Miles kept noting, for OSF housing to be viable someone brave '… has to put money on the table'. (23) It may not be British capital that comes forward.
'Japan is often cited as an exemplar country for pre-fabrication, but the market there differs fundamentally from the UK…These factors make houses consumer items rather than assets, viewed as we in the UK regard cars.' (24)
It was the opportunities
in development finance that most interested Robert Lombardelli, a chartered
surveyor and senior partner at the Robert Lombardelli Partnership. His work on
OSF with architects such as Levitt Bernstein informed the presentation. He
advised that the simple integration of services was of the utmost importance.
Like Allford, he also knew that the economies were lost the more the
architecture - perhaps due to an insistence from planning departments on a
particular aesthetic - had to be achieved by on-site modifications or additions
to the delivered OSF units. Site scaffolding was a good measure of failure in
OSF where the modules should be the structure and should come as pre-finished
as possible.
Predictably perhaps Lombardelli was also keen on the partnering that seemed to accompany OSF projects, and did not see vague partnership arrangements to be problematic as a diffusion or evasion of liabilities. He preferred to call partnership '… co-operative procurement - recognising the common interests of the entire team.' (25) This was Eganite spin, and Allford reminded Lombardelli that construction management catchphrases are no substitute for clear contractual commitments between the parties with differing interests.
'I was talking to a 70 year architect about the benefits in partnering of being able to talk to businesses in the supply chain. He said "… we used to do that - it was called nominating sub-contractors".' (26)
It was a pity that the question of responsibilities and terms of employment was not further pursued, but the seminar was already packed with content. The clue was in the observation made earlier by Miles; that the site based house building industry is optimised to the extent that it is fragmented into a multiplicity of hierarchical but dissolvable contractual arrangements as a means of minimising capital investment or standing labour costs. It is not enough simply to import the partnering practices of manufacturing industry into such an optimally backward construction industry.
Only with the risk of losing substantial capital investment through OSF product ranges will long term and strong commercial relationships be realised throughout the supply chain, and across specialised consultancies.
Partnering cannot simply be invoked by
forms of words - it rests on there being nowhere else for the parties to go
except toward a successful return on investment. Interestingly The Housing
Forum suggests that capitalisation to build OSF factories may not need to be as
large as might be imagined. This assumes that national housing demand does not
require a higher annual output of units.
'These factories are designed to meet the twin (and sometimes conflicting) demands of "lean" and "agile" production, with systems that are carefully balanced to deliver the following characteristics:
- Flexibility of product (allowing different house types to be delivered against unpredictable demand)
- Elasticity of production (allowing the plant to cope with the peaks and troughs of demand)
- Low capital cost (recognising that even the entire national demand at 180,000 units a year is a small volume over which to amortise the investment)
Only the simultaneous achievement of these three goals will allow cost-effective products to flow into the market place and become widely accepted by the housebuilders. This is a very significant challenge for production engineers and factory process designers. Very few manufacturing systems currently boast the simultaneous achievement of these objectives and a successful outcome cannot be guaranteed.' (27)
It was Allford who most
successfully communicated the sense of challenge that OSF presents to those
getting involved and making progress. With a sense of missed historical
opportunity he spoke for many at the seminar who felt that another historic
moment was with the construction industry, and that it must not be missed
again. However, Allford seemed torn as an architect, and wanted to avoid being
a specialist in OSF. I think many architects think like this:
'We are not specialist modular housing architects. We are architects who have had the opportunity to do some modular housing.' (28)
It was this reluctance to commit wholly to OSF as a specialism, or maybe even to be subsumed into the employment of a manufacturer, that seemed to undermine the call for adventurous capital investment. That is not to say anyone has to believe the venture will necessarily succeed. The risk inherent within the challenge that The Housing Forum identifies will remain. Yet it was particularly noteworthy that professional specialisation should be resisted by an architect who is among the few doing most to have repetitive but customised housing built in pursuit of the elusive urban renaissance.
The Pre-Fabulous Home was one of the best events I have attended recently. Yet the future of OSF is more than simply stacking units at high densities on brownfield sites for subsidised rents or equity share. OSF needs to leave the safety and the limitations of the social housing sector. The forthcoming off-site construction industry will have to deliver an unprecedented consumer good in various forms for any site condition.
Cheap at the price, spacious and packed with functionality, such homes will be upgraded through the kind of after sales service we rightly expect from car manufacturers.
As Allford appreciates, '… There are a series of gains and penalties', and '… the danger is that the thinking about the making takes over from the quality of the product.' (29) This brought us back to Miles, asking whether '…you ever think about how things are made?' (30) The point for me was that quality of housing can be raised by changing the way we make them, and resolving qualitative issues in prefabricated house design will ease production. Allford and Miles are not conflict:
- Push the performance and functionality of units to extremes
- Raise expectations in landscaping and urban design
- Build large modules to the limits of transportation and craneage
- Reduce circulation space by planning volumes and stacking
- Minimise component interfaces but maximise the range
- Avoid scaffolding and site based construction by pre-finishing
- Simplify foundations and utilities connections for fit-first-time
- Make all building services accessible and upgradeable
- Anticipate damage and the need for periodic refurbishment
- Use a preliminary unit in design, training, and as a control sample
- Exchange ideas, recognise mistakes, and build on success
- Commit to suppliers and drive down the cost of housing
- Offer services, including financing, furnishing and upgrades
- Maximise IT for cyclical product and service improvement
- Design out maintenance and reduce running costs
As Allford said, '… we need to think about where we struggle in
the complex weave of people involved in building.' (31) That will not happen
successfully within the social housing sector beneath the insulation and burden
of government subsidy. Only when architects of the calibre of Allford or
surveyors as keen as Lombardelli can break free of the protection afforded by
the safe patronage of imaginative agencies like the Peabody Trust - to create
the commercial market for OSF - will we know that the pre-fabulous home has
optimally arrived. Yet as Homing in on Excellence clearly shows, the
absence of public funding was not sufficient in the past to encourage the
private sector to meet the shortfall in house production.
'How much longer can we go on building at an all time low before property becomes so destitute and derelict that it is more expensive to refurbish than to rebuild them. The answer is not an awful lot longer.' (32)
In the short term OSF will be stacked high, will not be cheap, and will probably not be for sale freehold. Government subsidy will seem like a start, but there is much more to achieve - such as the replacement of all outmoded housing stock within 50 down to 25 year cycles. The maths is easy. For a country with say 25 million households that would mean refurbishment or replacement of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 homes of various types, densities and locations every year. Britain currently builds just over 160,000 new homes a year on site. Ongoing refurbishment struggles with an ageing stock as equity in inadequate old housing is haemorrhaged for repairs and home improvements.
We need investment in OSF to raise levels of house production, to reduce the cost of living by saturating the market. The question that The Housing Forum ask is '… from whom?' Ian Abley 31 July 2002
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