It’s an idea that is revolutionizing the construction industry as we know it: Use prefabricated modules to build more than 6,000 housing units, 2,250 of which will be affordable housing. Prefabricated houses are not new. The modular construction technique has been around as early as 1911 when the Sears and Roebuck catalog offered 44 “modern home designs”. Modular Construction today is principally used for low-rise buildings. Strong winds exert a tremendous amount of force on taller buildings, and lower floors have to support the weight of many floors above. With Modular Construction, the challenge comes in designing components that can withstand those forces and do it within a certain price range.
Affordable Housing-A Key Component of the Project
The Mega Project will include 16 towers and a new basketball arena over 22 acres in Brooklyn. Work will start on two of the site’s buildings; numbers 3 and 14, which are entirely affordable, within a year. Those are the two buildings indicated “affordable” in the site plan above, and construction will start by December of this year on the Carlton Avenue One, set to contain 299 affordable apartments. The affordable building to the west on Sixth Avenue will have 301 affordable units and start construction in March of 2015. Some completed affordable apartments will be for families of four with an annual income below $48,000, while others will be for families earning up to $88,000/year and $104,000/year.
Bill Cavanaugh, Vice President of USModular, Inc. sees how Modular Construction is transforming the construction industry. “With a high profile project like Atlantic Yards, the weather comes into play on the job-site, whereas when you’re doing the work in a manufacturing facility, it can be snowing or raining at the job site and you can still be producing the module work in a controlled factory environment without missing a beat”.
Todd Kesseler, President of USModular, Inc. agrees. “Anything that we can do to reduce the cost of construction is going to help the challenges we are facing in this housing market. Modular construction potentially is the way to help the construction industry as a whole…especially on projects requiring Prevailing or Davis/Bacon wages as these expenses can be reduced by up to 80% by using off-site fabrication of the buildings””.
Todd Kesseler Interview in Modular Home Coach
The 930 steel modules that will make up the structure are being fabricated by FCS Modular, a joint venture by engineering firm Skanska and project developer Forest City Ratner, in a warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before they are trucked 2.5 miles to the building site. Currently, the process of building one module and snapping it in place at the project takes about 20 days.
People in the construction industry are watching this project with great interest. Industry Executives say modular construction has the potential to create more construction jobs in a slow housing market. Confidence in the idea was recently bolstered by a project in Wolverhampton, England. A 25-story college dormitory was built out of 805 modules in just 27 weeks. It is one of the tallest modular buildings in the world. So far, it has been standing up in the wind just fine.
