Episode 14: Factory-based Construction
By: City Of The Future
Tags: City Of The Future, Cities, Construction, Sustainability, Building

Karim Khalifa: Change is hard, right? Everybody in the ecosystem has to take a step in the same direction to make it work.

Eric Jaffe: That’s Karim Khalifa, the Director of Product Design for Buildings at Sidewalk Labs.

Vanessa Quirk: You may remember Karim from Season 1 of City of the Future, when he helped us realize the potential of mass timber, which has a much lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel.

Karim Khalifa: Mass timber is the material of the future. The reason you go to mass timber is really for sustainability, but when you combine it with the factory you get speed and quality.

Eric Jaffe: According to Karim, these three benefits — quality, speed, and sustainability — could really convince the building industry as a whole to buy into factory-based construction.

Vanessa Quirk: And getting to these benefits starts with changing the design process itself.

Karim Khalifa: If you think of how architects work today, they will buy a window from a catalog, or a door from a catalog. So why does everybody have to design a floor plate from scratch? Why can’t they pick a floor plate from a catalog?

Eric Jaffe: To help standardize the design process, Karim and his team are developing what they call an architectural kit of parts. It’s just four building parts — but like different Lego pieces, they can be combined in countless ways.

Lily Huang: The idea is that these four kit of parts could create an infinite number of different mass timber buildings.

Vanessa Quirk: That’s Lily Huang, an architect who works on the Buildings team. We asked her to break down the kit of parts for us.

Lily Huang: There are four basic elements that form our kit, and they are facade panels, so that’s everything that wraps around the exterior of the building, including windows, doors and everything that’s part of that envelope. And then the next part is the floor cassettes, which encompasses the floor of one unit, but the ceiling above so it’s really that sandwich that is in between a unit. It includes fire safety such as sprinklers. It’ll include mechanical, so the HVAC and ducts, and then it’ll include acoustic layers to protect the sound from traveling.

Eric Jaffe: So we have facade panels and floor cassettes. What’s the third element?

Lily Huang: The third element is the structural component so that’s columns and beams, and these are the elements that hold up the building. And the last element is our interior partition modular walls.

Sidewalk Labs is developing an architectural kit of parts for factory-based construction that can be combined in different ways. (Image: Sidewalk Labs)

Vanessa Quirk: Okay, so keeping in mind that the benefits here are quality, speed, and sustainability, let’s start with quality. Lily, how does the kit of parts allow you as an architect to make a really high quality building, you know, one that doesn’t feel cookie-cutter?

Lily Huang: Yeah, you’d think that only having four parts would result in boring buildings, but it’s actually the opposite. Having the kit takes away the boring aspect of the design and lets the architect focus on the more creative parts.

Karim Khalifa: We want to leave some creativity for a sense of place, and how an architect might want a space to feel to a community, or to a neighborhood.

Karim Khalifa: And look, just to be clear, our kit of parts is not going to make a Frank Gehry building, right? He will have stretched and broken our parts. But there aren’t that many Frank Gehry buildings out there either. And so most of us are trying to build really nice buildings that really perform well, and that have some character. And we think we can fit that mold. We can actually offer really good building materials and building components that are assembled to people who normally wouldn’t be able to afford them.

Lily Huang: We actually studied which real-world buildings we’d be able to make with our kit of parts, and we found we could make 90 percent of the buildings in New York City. So, with four parts, you can really create a huge variety of building types.

Eric Jaffe: And what about speed? How does the kit of parts help with that?

Karim Khalifa: Yeah, so by using the kit of parts we can develop factory process lines that, with their precision machinery, are able to shape pieces of mass timber at a very high production rate.

Parts such as floor cassettes can be produced in advance then transported to construction sites. (Image: Sidewalk Labs)

Lily Huang: Yeah, mass timber is significantly lighter than concrete and steel and therefore simpler and more cost-effective to transport, as well as assemble with one or two people per part.

Karim Khalifa: Our kit of parts is similar to Legos. Each of the Lego blocks has little dots on top and it actually has a recess in the bottom, so when they come to your construction site you can actually fit them together because they’ve been designed that way.

Eric Jaffe: So the pieces are designed for machines and factory workers to produce super fast, and they’re shipped to construction workers who are trained to put them together almost as quickly as Legos.

Lily Huang: And it’s also important to note that because the pieces have been cut so precisely with these machines, they come together like perfect puzzle pieces. Which isn’t just important for speed of assembly, but actually for sustainability, because airtight buildings require less energy to heat and cool.

Vanessa Quirk: That’s a really good point, Lily. So let’s get deeper into that sustainability piece. What are other ways that factory-based construction offers sustainability gains? Off the bat, I could imagine that this process must be less wasteful, since we know exactly how much material we need from the start and can make exactly that amount, nothing more.

Lily Huang: Yeah, and we would also have a bill of materials. So, each part would have X amount of wood, glass, fasteners, insulation, and with that, we would know the carbon footprint of each of these components, and of the whole building, before we’ve assembled it.

Karim Khalifa: So when you assemble the whole building, you get the list of kit of parts, you get the price of all of your parts, and you get the sustainability factor readout as well. So in today’s world, that’s really not — you’re not able to do that. You keep selecting materials and asking for data about its sustainability, and some materials have it and some don’t. But because we’re going to do this over and over again, we can now ask for the people that are supplying those materials to provide us the sustainability of that material.

Vanessa Quirk: And, with mass timber as the building material, Karim and Lily think we could take this idea even further. You could track not only the carbon emissions of a piece of timber, but even how sustainably it was harvested. And you could press the industry to keep improving.

Lily Huang: Recognizing that buildings are about 40 percent of carbon emissions, I think the way that we build now has to radically change if we’re going to address that. If we really want to address the climate change problem in the way that we need to in the next 5 or 10 years, we really need to change up the design process. And the answer to that, I think, is mass timber.

Eric Jaffe: And it’s this piece of the puzzle — the fact that mass timber is not just light and strong, but better for our planet — that might just be the most important piece of all.

Karim Khalifa: Manufactured buildings are a great opportunity to get efficient buildings built, but when you combine it with mass timber — which is a super-sustainable material — you’re ending up with a better building and doing something that’s better for the environment all at once.

Vanessa Quirk: And Karim isn’t the only one who’s bought into this idea. In fact, in the Pacific Northwest — a movement of factory-constructed mass timber buildings is already gaining momentum.