SUBS #1:
Site Built, Manufactured, or Modular [Panelized] Building?

The two main ways of putting up buildings today are either site built one stick at a time or factory manufactured and shipped more or less complete to the site.

Site built allows infinite design freedom, but is much slower and much more costly. However, it can make one building at a time, and be done by an owner-builder or local contractor.

Manufactured housing built on indoor assembly lines gives excellent quality standardized buildings at a vastly reduced price.  Like mobil homes, it is difficult and expensive to ship because you have to truck a lot of air aound in oversized wide load packages with warning vehicles, and you always have to redo the drywall and other things that fall apart in shipping.  You also need a huge capital investment in factory, equipment and inventory, and must build many buildings in a continuous process.  You can't build just one building; you have to keep churning them out in an endless stream.

Modular or Panelized construction can give many of the advantages of both methods.  A small number of simple panels can be combined in different combinations to create a huge variety of designs.

Door, window and floor panels would make up most of a typical building shell.  Tilt the floor panel on end to make a wall panel.  Put it overhead for a roof panel.  If it's strong enough for flooring, it's overbuilt for walls and roofing.  Keep it simple, don't try to build everything as flimsy as possible, and use the same panel for all three uses where possible.  The slight extra material expense will be more than offset by simplicity, flexibility, inventory savings, and no "wrong panel" screwups.

Small simple truly modular panels can be built in a small shop and stacked outside under a tarp to be assembled later at the building site.   They can be complely painted and weatherized before leaving the shop.  They are much easier and more efficient to ship than manufactured buildings as they are flat, don't have that much air in them, and pack nicely on a small truck, even a pickup.   For a very large job, you could deliver basic materials right to the site and build panels there in a portable shop.

Since most of the building would be assembled from just a few basic types of standard panels, manufacturing efficiency can exceed even that of factory-built houses.  Since no huge factory is required, the owner builder or small contractor can put up one building fairly easily.  They won't be able to approach the materials prices of a huge factory buying trainloads of material, but beyond that they are fairly competititve.

Furthermore, small pieces of the final building can be shop assembled into kitchen, bath, laundry or other modules by installing appliances, wiring, plumbing, cabinets, etc.  Conforming to the Simple Universal Building System geometry, they would easily mate with other simpler but larger parts of the main building that were assembled on site from panels.  Subcontractors specializing in these small preassembled parts of the final house could achieve many factory savings in appliance laden areas, while still allowing you to ship most of the building as simple knocked down slabs.

If you bought raw materials in huge quantities and mass produced a few simple standard panels, you could undercut even factory built houses because you don't need an aircraft hanger.  The local contractor or owner builder could still exist in this scheme, assembling simple mass produced cheap industrial commodity building panels into their own custom designs on a one-off basis.

I focus on housing examples here, the these principles apply to any kind of building.  No one builds a door or window on site any more, even in a "site built" house, and many buildings are entirely constructed off site and simply trucked in.  There are large advantages to the middle ground.  Many virtues of both systems are obtained by manufacturing standard modular panels and units which are assembled on site.  Don't build a wall or a floor on site, any more than you would build a door or window.  Shop build it in panels and ship it to the site with the doors already framed and plumbed and the windows hung.

Shop-built site-assembled modular building allows design flexiblity, factory efficiency, and can produce a truly superior building.

Bill Dur <billdur@net-prophet.net>

modular.systems * Simple Universal Building System * "Superior By Design"