Prefabrication — a decades-old concept for saving money and time in construction once dismissed as synonymous with low quality — is making a huge comeback in an era when advances in computer-aided design have reinvented the idea into an indispensable tool for some of the biggest commercial building projects.
The “prefab” concept blossomed in the 1950s, when it became shorthand for slapped-together housing erected as quickly as possible to meet the needs of the baby boom generation. For the first time, builders used components that were assembled in off-site workshops and shipped in on trucks in order to mass-produce millions of starter homes across the country.
The results were often less-than-stellar, derided in popular culture as cookie-cutter and soulless — think Pete Seeger’s song “Little Boxes.”
Skip ahead to 2014, when multimillion-dollar apartment buildings, hospitals, massive data centers and commercial buildings of all types from major builders such as Opus Design Build and Mortenson Construction are incorporating 21st-century versions of prefabrication on a big scale — and turning those negative perceptions on their head.
Article in full: http://strib.mn/1lbPeyS