Dalston Works, London. Pushing the boundaries of what is possible in offsite construction
It’s not about innovation for innovation’s sake. By combining new offsite construction techniques and digital design capabilities with decades of engineering knowledge, we offer new and better ways to meet the most pressing challenges faced by the UK construction industry:
Rapid advances in computational design and the ability to access and use data are creating opportunities to revolutionise the process of design, engineering and construction. Add to this our extensive practical engineering experience and we’re creating solutions that deliver real client benefits, fully integrated with existing design and build process.
Our engineers have developed a suite of advanced digital tools to revolutionise the way we design, plan and build. The suite includes: EVOLVE, ITERATE & OPTIMISE and EMPOWER. They allow us to rapidly step through the concept stage, speed up detailed design and improve buildability for the onsite phase. We do this whilst enabling clients to easily join us on the design journey.
Created to solve real life engineering and construction challenges, the EVOLVE tools allow us to model and analyse multiple design options faster and earlier in the process. This has led to an improvement in the quality of solution, due to wider option exploration.
These digital tools allow us to rapidly evaluate different structural options for example, based on specific site constraints and usage plans, we can optimise framing arrangements and maximise the efficiency of building foundations. These tools provide clear visualisation of quantitative design data supporting earlier decision making, which further de-risks the design, earlier in the process.
Our industry leading dynamic dashboard reporting provides improved transparency and flexibility for both clients and the design team. Demonstrating robustness of the proposal in concept, price and programme, better informed value decisions can be made, earlier in the process.
This technology led approach is paying dividends across all sectors. In addition to buildings, cities and major infrastructure projects we design gantries for the UK’s road network in a fraction of the time it used to take. We now design 95% of all new gantries, underpinning Highway England’s commitment to delivering a Smart Motorway network.
While the UK construction industry is now talking about offsite construction as a means to building our way out of the housing crisis we’ve been quietly walking the walk. In Scandinavia offsite construction is considered normal. It is faster, cleaner and safer, and by moving the construction into a specialist factory environment, means skilled labour can be efficiently deployed. Critically, considering offsite construction early in the design process is where we can demonstrate to clients’ real value from the benefits it creates:
There is a range of offsite and onsite techniques available to suit every project and it’s vital that all options are considered early in the design process. Our unrivalled experience and expertise in utilising all forms of offsite construction allow us to deploy:
And if traditional onsite construction is the right solution, that’s what we’ll use.
* Based on the forest in which the wood for Dalston Works was sourced: With one cubic meter of wood mass grown every second in German and Austrian forests, less what is lost during production processes, Dalston Works was effectively grown in under three hours.
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