Industrial building is more than copy-paste with a BIM model underneath

Say industrial building and many people immediately picture prefabricated shells, assembly line work and concept homes in three flavors of brick. Efficient, fast, repeatable. And somewhere in the back of your mind creeps the fear: soon every neighborhood will have the same copy-paste neighborhood, serial discomfort in neat rows.

At the same time, the government is pushing hard, contractors have built factories, and we have to solve the housing shortage! So this column is for my friends at the IOP. The Ministry of VRO's Program of Innovation and Upscaling.

I see that the problem is not in the factory. The problem is in how we think about it. We have too often treated industrial building as a box of standard products, rather than as a data-driven process. And that's exactly what makes the difference between a parametric housing structure and the new generation of gallery flats.

At the beginning of my career I worked on standard houses for contractors. Technically excellent stuff: affordable, logically laid out, easy to sell, exactly what the market demanded during the economic crisis. But you also saw something else: the same types popped up everywhere. Sometimes they hit the target audience perfectly, sometimes not. Like handing out one size sweater in four colors and being surprised that not everyone walks comfortably in it.

The mistake is at the front. The factory is not the starting point. The real start is the information need. Who are we building for, in what context, with what hard requirements and what soft patterns of use? You need standard products, but first you need standard data chunks: requirements for space, sound, daylight, energy, accessibility, maintenance, management. You could call it parametric design but think very carefully about what the parameters are.

There are parties in the chain who are deadly serious about this. Housing corporations, for example. They run analyses on mutations, complaints, maintenance costs, vacancy, duration of residence. They know exactly which surfaces work, which installations are affordable to run, which floor plans cause arguments and which bring peace. That's where the gold is. But how do we bring this knowledge to the factory?

At the same time, there are groups of residents who cannot articulate exactly what they want, but do display predictable behavior. You can see it in usage patterns, in data, in how people adapt their homes. That's why some standard homes are perfectly tangential. But if you only listen to expressed desires, you miss half the story.

Industrial building without copy-paste starts there: with a serious information design. First standard data chunks, then standard concrete blocks.

In my head it looks like this: you have a library of information needs (target groups, living patterns, performance per room) and a library of building systems and elements (shells, facade solutions, bathrooms, installation modules). Industrial building, then, is not click concept A on location BBut: link demand profiles to product libraries and let a data-driven process find the logical combinations for this target group, at this location, within these preconditions.

Prefab then becomes not a dogma but an option. Sometimes full prefab is the smartest, sometimes a hybrid backbone with free shell, sometimes just a more traditional solution is rational - as long as it has gone through the same information frame. Industrial is about how you decide, not one sacred building system.

Now we often do it exactly the other way around. First the product is optimized: this is our concept, this is how it rolls out of the factory. Then the question presses in. Is it customer-oriented if we offer three facade variants and two kitchens? Meanwhile, corporations and municipalities have Excel sheets showing why this concept just scrapes past the real need in this neighborhood.

Added to this is the fear of loss of autonomy. Architects fear that a product platform will reduce their role. Contractors rely more on experience from the previous project than on the knowledge of a frame or HSB builder. Whereas a mature industrial process demands that the best knowledge on each component be allowed to lead - and that the architect shape the whole within that common performance framework and the rules of the building system. In the end, municipalities usually still prefer to trust only their own department.

Digitization is not a toy here, but the backbone for transparent decision-making. Without well-structured data, without standardized information fields, without linkage between demand profiles and product libraries, industrial building becomes just copy-paste with a BIM model underneath. With good data, it becomes a way to spend less time on the same mistakes over and over again, and more time on the places where it really matters: the edges, the mix, the exceptions, what makes the project truly unique.

Filing moment

The question is not whether industrial building by definition leads to ugly copy-paste cities, but whether we dare to start with invisible data chunks instead of visible concrete blocks and building systems. As long as we are pushing an optimized product over a half-understood question, we are only efficiently building wrong.

First establish the rules of play for the building systems, test objectively whether they match the demand at that specific location - then you can build quickly, transparently and well for the people who really need to live there.

About Pim's digital maze

In this column, Pim takes you into the sometimes wonderful, tangled but rapidly changing world of digitization. He draws on his experiences as director of digitalization at VORM. Pim is outspoken, critical, but above all wants to help you. Are you stuck in the digital maze? Pim helps you find the way out.... Do you have a question for Pim or are you looking to get in touch with him? Follow Pim on LinkedIN.