The property industry is not facing a housing crisis but a process crisis, a panel heard at EG’s London Development Summit.
Speaking about the importance of embracing modular construction, Anthony Thistleton, founding director of Waugh Thistleton Architects, said: “For us, it’s not a housing crisis. It’s a process crisis. Our industry is broken.”
He added the construction and housing industries should learn from the car industry, where collaboration between different parts of the manufacturing process creates a better, more integrated product.
Traditional methods, Thistleton said, will be considered “quaint” in a few years: “It’s the same as if I said I was getting a new mobile phone this weekend and I’ve gone down to Maplin to get the components and I spend the day with a soldering iron.
“We all know I’d end up with something that didn’t work very well, that was very expensive and looked terrible.”
Toby Uppington, director of strategic planning at AECOM, added that the industry is “on the cusp” of understanding and accepting modular construction as a normal, beneficial method: “Modular really changes the dynamic of how fast you can get developments to market. When the industry starts to realise those benefits of halving construction time, ‘normal’ should come around far faster.”
Olivia Harris, chief executive of Dolphin Living, argued that faster modular techniques would also help the housing crisis by decreasing the amount of objection to development.
“We receive opposition through the planning process, and if we can reduce the time of development and reduce disruption, which is something that manufacturing would enable us to do, we should hopefully reduce the opposition to what we’re trying to achieve,” she said.
The problem is that the industry is largely a “protectionist” one, which does not think embracing new technology is in its best interest, said Barry Jessop, managing director of First Base.
However, the panel argued that the industry needs to realise that modular construction will work alongside traditional building to deliver the country’s housing requirements.
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