Atlantic Yards prefabs aiming for a luxury look, My Micro NY
set to begin this year in Kips Bay
NEW YORK—Modular building and prefabrication have been
gaining attention in recent years, largely because of high-profile projects and
micro-unit housing rolling out in major cities like New York and San Francisco.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg supported the modular concept
with his adAPT NYC micro-housing competition last year, allowing for smaller
than ever units to be built in the city. Construction of nARCHITECTS’ winning
design for My Micro NY, at 335 East 27th St., in Kips Bay, will begin this
year. Also, after 10 years in the works, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn
has finally started stacking modules.
Brooks McDaniel with SHoP Architects is project architect
for the first modular residential tower at Atlantic Yards. “Since modular is so
new to New York, we had to kind of reinvent the wheel,” said Brooks. “Once we
got over the engineering hurdles it was like designing any other [project].”
Modular is hardly new, but the Atlantic Yards project is
trying to create a luxury look using prefabricated modules.
The challenge was to not have “modular look like modular,”
with this particular project, McDaniel said.
Catch-22
My Micro NY, with units a mere 325-square feet–previously a
prohibited size for the city, will build units that are completely
self-supporting. Capsys, the company prefabricating the modules, has been in
the Brooklyn Navy Yard for 18 years.
There are obvious economic and sustainability benefits when
it comes to building modular, but the reason modular hasn’t been more popular
is a catch-22, said Tom O’Hara, a director at Capsys, who has been working with
modular building for 30 years.
Conventional construction is a “design-bid-build” product
whereas modular is a “design-build” product, so the developer really needs to
be planning for modular from the very beginning. The catch is that there aren’t
many modular designer-builders to begin with.
“If you put out a plan to build modularly, there aren’t a
lot of people who can respond,” O’Hara said. “And so developers worry about
whether they’re getting a competitive price.”
Still, much of Capsys’s work includes educating architects
and developers on the capabilities of modular construction, which O’Hara said
they are very receptive to.
Height Limitations
Height poses another perceived challenge. Atlantic Yards’
B2, its first residential tower of a planned 15, is set to be the world’s
tallest modular structure at 32 stories, but is not free standing. The
misconception is that above a certain height, the developer no longer saves
money by using prefabrication.
“It’s not a cost issue, it’s an engineering issue,” O’Hara
said.
Modular factories are built to produce a very specific
product. Capsys, for instance, designed its factory to be cost competitive in
delivering buildings up to 13 feet.
“And we could very easily have done a different system for a
different type of modular,” O’Hara said. “We’ve built everything from two story
townhouses to ten story buildings. But there are still some parameters there
that we’ve designed into our system.”
Speedy Timeline
For some projects, there are very compelling reasons to go
modular—for some, there just aren’t.
Construction quality and LEED certification are the basics,
O’Hara said, but one example of an added bonus is timeline.
Prefabrication saves time and, more importantly, is able to
deliver exactly on a specific opening date, which could be crucial to buildings
like student dormitories or event housing.
With My Micro NY, for instance, fabrication will start about
the same time the general contractor breaks ground. The first module will take
about two weeks to go through the assembly line, O’Hara said, and after that
one or two modules will come off the line every day.
“The project is around 60 modules so it really only takes a
few weeks to build them all,” O’Hara said. “We’ll probably be able to build the
modules faster than they can build the foundation.”
Source: Epochtimes.com
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