Re:Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buil...
by vvanders on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:05PM
(#17258478)
FWIW that's how all the trusses on your house were probably done.
I think it's mostly a cost/benefit tradeoff. My hunch is that the overhead of building on-site isn't that great when you have to figure in the overhead of shipping/designing something in a modular way. Pretty much everything is 8ft long in terms of building materials which makes it much easier to transport.
Re:Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buil...
by TylerE on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:25PM
(#17258673)
Because cars fit on all of our common transportation devices.
Houses, or even rooms, don't.
Re:Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buil...
by andrewksu on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:37PM
(#17261328)
Most modular just does it wrong. Doing fixed design is a great opportunity for better, deeper design. Think Apple or Tesla type design and engineering. Not many complaints around cookie cutter Audi RS7's or even Hyundais
The status quo is a home depot and it all gets figured out on the fly. We would be in a much better place with engineered kit as you describe Ford doing.
Re:Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buil...
by rtkwe on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:43PM
(#17258865)
There are places that do factory assembly of things like framing then ship it out to the job site, google or search youtube for preframed wall factory. It's becoming more popular precisely because labor and time are in short supply.
Re:Developers are manufacturing prefabricated apartment buil...
by Blackthorn on Thursday June 07, 2018 @03:28PM
(#17259342)
Modular construction is pretty big here in upstate NY. I've never seen a stigma against it vs stick built, and it does not appear to be a differentiator in home pricing here.
Anything else falls into the dreaded "modular home" category. You know, just one step above a single-wide trailer, at least in the minds of some. Never mind the fact that the only thing separating my ungodly expensive house in Redmond, which sits on a slab, from a modular home is that it was built onsite. "Bespoke"? phhhffft, I can find you a dozen houses within the radius of our daily dog walk that are exactly the same.
Personally, I think the status quo is equivalent to Ford dropping a box of parts at your local dealership, and you have to wait for the mechanic to assemble it. Why aren't robots framing my house in a factory somewhere?