Open and Industrialised Building

A. Sarja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135806699
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

There is clearly potential for the industrial production of open buildings, buildings where the parts which are designed to allow a high degree of freedom for layout, construction and adaptation. Industrialized open building has the potential to radically cut building costs and construction time. This book focuses on product and production systematics and information systematics, and begins with an extensive survey of the field by the editor. The second part consists of a series of descriptions of the experience of different countries, and chapters on particular themes. The book presents new material developed from Commission W24 of the CIB (the International Council for Building Research Studies and Documentation).

Part 1
State of the art and trends in open industrialisation

Asko Sarja

1
Background

Building production world-wide is a vast business area, which is important for the entire welfare of the people, for the economy of organisations and companies and for general sustainable development of societies. The societies in most developed countries have already passed from the industrial era into the post-industrialised phase, while the NIC countries are at a fast developing phase of industrialisation and the developing countries are at the very start of it.

Building technology is still mostly a local production, which applies industrial principles quite inefficiently. This is one reason why housing apartments and buildings for business and industry are generally expensive and production is sensitive to recessions. Building production has been gradually developing towards industrialised production, already over several decades. Commonly used prefabricated products are small structural components like doors, windows and kitchens as well as heating and building services and electrical products. The bearing structural system, partitions and facades vary widely in the share of prefabrication in different countries.

The construction process and project management methods have generally undergone quite little industrialisation compared with industrial production in other fields, such as in the automotive industry, shipbuilding and mechanical industries. It can be stated that building technology as a whole is a semi-industrialised production area while the other fields of industrial production have already moved into the post-industrialised information era.

We are recognising that the slow increase in productivity of the building sector has already led to increasing costs, and that therefore the building market in developed countries lies in a long term stagnation phase. An important tool in re-activating the building market is the reduction of price levels. In the NIC countries the need for building is high and the prerequisite to effective industrialisation is the increase of production capacity. In the developing countries a gradual increase of productivity in manual working through semi-manual equipment and through industrial production of some bulk products is the main demand.

During the mass production era of the 1960s and 1970s the first attempts toward wider industrialisation of building were made in industrialised capitalistic and socialistic countries. Production requirements dictated town planning and architecture at the expense of social and aesthetic considerations. The technical quality was often insufficient especially in socialistic countries, with resulting general bias against industrialised building.

In order to meet economic requirements together with other requirements like aesthetics, functionality, ecology, durability, health and comfort of living, we have to rethink the entire content and solutions of industrialised building. Increasing international exchange of technology and building products activates industrial development through increasing competition and evolution with the help of a continuous selection of the most competitive technologies and products. This requires international openness of building, product and information systematics, because only in this way will we activate and accelerate the internationalisation trend. Buildings play a major role in defining the local culture of our built environment. Therefore even international technologies and products must be highly adaptable to both local traditions and the natural environment.

2
Glossary and definitions

2.1
GENERAL DEFINITIONS

Today the industrialisation of building means the application of modern systematised methods of design, production planning and control as well as mechanised and automated manufacturing processes.

The required openness refers to the capability to assemble products from alternative suppliers into the building and to exchange information between partners of the building process and inside the consortia and business networks. The application and exchange of products, services and information nationally and internationally as well as the adaptation of the products and services into varying local needs and cultures is essential. For this purpose an effective international co-operation is needed in order to develop proposals for definitions, rules and models for this kind of regional and local open building, utilising global technologies and methods into local applications.

The overall system is aimed at forming an entire building from interacting items. The system thus can be defined as an organised whole consisting of its parts, in which the relations between the parts are defined by rules. The system can be a product system, an organisational system or an information system. In the open industrialised building product system, the organisational system and information system are bound together.

The central scope of open industrialisation includes the following areas:

• Demand Side, dealing with user requirements and with the introduction of the requirements into designs.
• Supply Side, dealing with the production requirements and with the linking of demand and supply.
• Building Process, including organisation and communication in building projects.

Open system building is a general framework for the building industry, including modular systematics of products, organisation and information, dimensional co-ordination, tolerance system, performance based product specifications, product data models etc., so that the suppliers serve products and service modules that will fit together.

Openness is a concept with many aspects, like:

• OPEN for individual designs
• OPEN for competition between suppliers
• OPEN for alternative assemblies
• OPEN for future changes
• OPEN for information exchange
• OPEN for integration of modules and subsystems.

2.2
SPECIFIC DEFINITIONS

2.2.1
System

In this chapter several more or less similar existing definitions are presented in order to explain the term “System”. It is important to realise that most of these definitions are generally used in other branches of industry and play an important role in the development of modern industrial principles, methods and products, and materials and information processes. This kind of systematics was used in limited applications already in ancient times for masonry and stone structures, but the theoretical development started in the furniture industry and was followed by the so-called “Bauhaus” development in Germany in the 1920s. Later the centre of this development shifted to the mechanical industry and, in recent decades, to electrical and computer theories and businesses [46]. Even music composition and languages can be treated as modular systems having the same theoretical principles and in some cases terms as in technical and information systems. Some selected definitions are as follows:

A system is defined as a set of parts with holistic potential; that is, a set of parts organised to act as a whole [12].

A system is an organised whole consisting of its parts, in which the relations between the parts are defined by rules. The parts can be concrete (e.g. the components of a building system) or abstract (e.g. the components of an information system) [46].

System: An organised entity consisting of components which have defined relationships [46].

A system is usually defined as a group of interrelated components that act together to accomplish a specific objective [52].

System: a set of objects with relationships between them and between their attributes (comment: the boundaries of a system will change depending on the relationships being considered; thus, considering a building system from a technical point of view will lead to a study of components, joints, tolerances etc., and considering the same system from an organisational point of view will lead to a study of components, joints, tolerances etc., whereas considering the same system from an organisational point of view will involve the consideration of procurement, management, marketing etc.) [19] (Davidson).

A system is a set of entities, which may be real or conceptual (material or immaterial), and these interact with one another to form a whole: an open system has a specified environment within which to react whereas a closed system is one that ignores its environment. In the open system energy can pass in and out but the system maintains its homeostatic state—a principle enunciated by Cannon in 1939 [45].

2.2.2
Building system, Open building system, Closed building System

In this chapter, the following selected definitions are presented:

Building system: This includes design rules and a product system whose parts have compatible interfaces thus permitting the use of several alternative components and assemblies. The compatibility of the components and assemblies is assured by means of a dimensional and tolerance system as well as of connections and joints [46].

Set of building components: A set of components designed in such a way that they can be combined with each other in different ways and that the links with other components are studied in advance. The components of such a system can be described in a “System Catalogue”, the rules for combination in a “Design Guide” (grids, rules for positioning, performances,…) [15].

Open system: A system that does exchange objects or information with its environment (comment: an “open system of building” can be envisaged in technical terms, provided certain conventions are respected; in organisational terms, there is evidence that “open system building” presents a number of disadvantages that can conveniently be overcome with some organisational “closing” of the systems) [19] (Davidson).

Open system: The integral open system is Utopian, as is a universal assembly system. The bases of the “open system” which are possible under such conditions are as described below:

There are catalogues of components which comply with the same dimensional discipline. These components have assembly compatibility which is not always necessarily identified. The hypothesis is that a set of catalogues of locally available catalogues contains sufficient compatibility and diversity to satisfy a reasonable demand for architectural and technical variety [19] (Lugez).

Open system buildings: These are buildings that have been put up with components coming from independent producers, each with his own catalogue, the catalogues altogether forming the general catalogue of the open system [10].

‘Systems to order’: Systems using components manufactured to order, which may be called ‘systems to order’ (as an example of this, almost all present systems of concrete prefabrication) [10].

“Open system building” or “Open Industrialisation of the building sector”: An approach for the construction sector providing a framework so that different “Open building systems” can be elaborated. The core of this framework are standards or rules on dimensional co-ordination and compatibility of performances [15].

Openness of the building system: The system is open for

• free design for varying requirements
• free competition between contractors and suppliers
• future changes in the use and
• reuse and recycling [46].

Open Building is a set of principles for constructing and renovating residential and other kinds of buildings. The principles help solve problems when decisions are organised on several levels, among a number of parties who prefer to act independently while expecting a coherent architecture to result [29].

A system is a set of entities which may be real or conceptual (material or immaterial) and these interact with one another to form a whole: an open system has a specified environment within which to react whereas a closed system is one that ignores its environment [45].

A closed system is one in which there is no import or export of energy — the common example given is a number of reactants brought together in a closed vessel. However, truly closed systems are hard to find and it is most useful to think of the terms as relatively descriptive, and in this way they have a purpose. For a system to be identifiable at all it has to have a degree of closure and it is again what constitutes that closure that is of interest [45].

Closed system: A system that exchanges nothing with its environment (comment: in reality, a “closed system of building” cannot exist in technical terms, since at least the cement, reinforcing steel, plumbing fixtures and paint will be brought in from outside the bounds of the system; in organisational terms, however, a “closed system of building” denotes one which is under a single, unified controlling organisation with which all clients must deal for virtually all aspects of a project- and it is this aspect which is seen (a) to limit the market for the parts to the market of the whole, and (b) to constrain the freedom of decision-making of the exsystem participants, notably the architects) [19] (Davidson).

The term “building system” or “system building” as interchangeably used means “a generating system for building or a set of building components which may be assembled in different ways to create a variety of building configurations” [27] (Commandante).

A building system is defined as a set of components for a particular type of building, together with their production and erection procedures [52].

Meccano set: Systems using components taken from a firm’s catalogue, the components having been designed for assembly among themselves; this is what is known as the meccano set by analogy with the construction toys that also include a catalogue of components [10].

Editor’s comments:

The various definitions above are mostly quite similar, the differences reflecting different phases of development of systems. The earlier way of thinking concerns only the compatibility of components, which often are understood as standardised catalogue components. The latest definitions point out more general systematics, including product system, organisational system and information system. Instead of strict standardisation of products, the compatibility rules as well as compatible geometry at interfaces and performance properties are important.

2.2.3
Hierarchical and modular building system

The following definitions are selected:

Hierarchical building system: A building system consisting of hierarchical subsystems where each part of a lower level belongs to only one part of the upper level. The degree of a system is the number of its hierarchical levels, i.e. combination levels [46].

In a hierarchical system the parts can be located at different levels in the organised whole. The parts of an upper hierarchical level are composed of the parts of the hierarchical levels below it [46].

An open modular system consists of modular parts at different hierarchical levels, for which it is possible to produce different interchangeable products and designs that can be joined together according to connection rules to form a functional whole [46].

Modulation involves division of the whole from the perspective being dealt with at any particular time (e.g. functions, spaces, technical design, production planning, quality) into sub-entities, which to a significant extent are compatible and independent. The modulation can take place at different hierarchical levels [46].

The parts of a modulated system can form at different hierarchical levels sub-entities, which to a significant extent are independent. The relations between the sub-entities are defined by the system’s rules [46].

2.2.4
Industrialised system building

A special group of systems, often referred to as “industrialisation onsite” or simply as “industrialised building”, combines intensive utilisation of various precast elements with highly rationalised framing construction methods [52].

Industrialisation process is defined as an investment in equipment, facilities, and technology with the purpose of increasing output, saving manual labour, and improving quality [52].

Industrialisation is the use of technologies to rep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: State of the art and trends in open industrialisation
• Part 2: Selected personal visions