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"I like how the fading gray on that big boy really blends in with the bleak Berlin winter sky. Not depressing at all. Sometimes I do look at buildings like that and ask myself, why did I choose to live in this city?" Ever since I moved to Berlin, I've had a morbid fascination with this neighborhood's architecture. "Long ones like these just keep going, and going, and going. It doesn't end." This district, Lichtenberg, is loaded with cheap, prefabricated, or prefab, constructions called "Plattenbau". In the aftermath of World War II, Berlin needed to rebuild lots of housing and fast. In the communist eastern part of the city,
Plattenbau were the solution. Huge, pre-cast concrete slabs were assembled on site for fast, easily reproduced projects. Eventually, more than a million apartments were built in East Germany and the same thing happened all over the Eastern bloc. Plattenbau were highly sought after. these days, not so much. "These aging beauties are everywhere and basically made this neighborhood a punch line."
Many people don't just crack jokes about the architecture - plenty of the buildings are worse for wear and some of their neighborhoods struggle economically - all of which creates a real stigma. But despite the reputation, lots of people want to bring them back, big time - and say they could be a solution to one of our biggest problems. So what gives? Part of the answer is nearly 700 kilometers west of Lichtenberg. We headed to this huge plant in the Netherlands. "You need a safety vest."
"Thank you very much." "And I'll give you a nice helmet." "It's massive. I mean, it's like multiple football-field-sized warehouse factories. Pretty impressive." This hulking plant looks like plenty of other factories, but instead of cars or appliances, they're building entire houses. It's kind of like Plattenbau on steroids, and a lot sleeker. While the old housing blocks we just saw were identical concrete walls fitted on top of each other, this factory transforms massive concrete slabs into fully equipped "modules."
These self-contained boxes will either be entire studios or combined together to form bigger apartments. After an automated ride through the factory, they'll be ready to be shipped off and installed later. "It moves through the hallway, and every 45 minutes it changes the position to another workstation. So another coworker can do other assembly work there. And after 17 workstations, the module is completely finished." Instead of doing all this over months at the construction site - pouring concrete, framing timber, adding insulation and plumbing in waves, Daiwa House says that they can build one module in about twelve hours.
"That's pretty amazing. They just dropped in an entire bathroom already set up." After installing completed bathrooms and kitchens, placing the walls and windows, they're set aside to make room for the next module. We also got a preview of what these look like when they're done at Daiwa's showroom. Though they added furniture, all the appliances are built in, from small student digs built from a single module, to multifamily homes built out of three. "They all just look like apartments. You know, you know. The whole process of building them is quite different, and you think maybe that means you'll notice it when you're inside, but it just looks like an apartment."
"Yeah." They even have a model set up for US-style apartments, complete with American outlets, and an extra spacious fridge and oven. "I feel right at home, you could fit a Thanksgiving turkey in that bad boy." Back in the factory, workers at each station are highly specialized, and there are fewer of them than you'd usually see at a construction site. "There are around 30 people working here right now." "Yeah." "And they are producing 10 to 15 homes a day. In a traditional setting.
I'd say add the double crew. So, 60 people to build that kind of number of homes per day." According to the company's own calculations, producing housing this way can reduce costs and cut the time it takes to complete projects by up to 50%. Precise planning also cuts down on wasted material and there's a long-term benefit to using modules. "It's more sustainable than in a traditional building. You can't tear, you can't move a traditional building, you need to tear it down when the function or the location needs to be changed.
A modular building, well you can take it apart like Lego blocks and put them on a truck and replace them on another location and reuse them again." Daiwa House has relocated a school made of modules, and plans to move 800 student apartments from Amsterdam to another city soon. Reduced waste and reusability are important, because how we build our houses is a real problem. Construction accounts for 13% of global energy-related carbon emissions. And it's not just about putting up buildings: When structures are demolished,
a majority of the waste usually ends up in landfill. In Europe, construction and demolition account for about one third of all waste. "We generally build the exact same way we have for the last 100-plus years." Tyler Pullen is an expert in engineering and architecture and researches housing. While an overwhelming amount of what we use every day started to get made in a factory at some point, houses typically aren't. That means they are slower to put together. Which is complicated by the fact that… "Construction workforces globally tend to be shrinking and aging and not recruiting enough people to keep up with the demand."
A slow, outdated construction industry has helped contribute to a global housing crisis. Costs in many urban areas have skyrocketed, and for many people, it's hard to even find anything at all. It's a tight squeeze in rapidly industrializing countries like India, which has a shortage of nearly 10 million housing units. The US has a shortage of over 4 million units, while Germany needs more than a million. We might joke about the housing solutions of the past but looks become a bit less important given Berlin alone is reportedly about 60,000 housing units short.
Back in Lichtenberg, the neighborhood oft derided as peak Plattenbau is now a testing ground for Berlin's return to pre-fab glory. This sprawling site is going to be about 1,500 new apartments, all built out of modules - in this case shipped from a similar factory in Germany. It's one of the largest modular construction projects in Europe. Here, half the job is moving modules, as they're stacked next to each other and secured.
Roughly 25 of these go up a day. "This is a totally different way of construction because everything is already made in the factory." Jaap de Keizer is overseeing the Lichtenberg project. "when you've got the module together, you have also some connection plates, doors you need to hang in, things like that, make the connection of the electrics, the heating, the water, all these things [we] are doing here on the site." According to Jaap, flooring, spackling, painting and other details are done on each floor at a clip of about a floor a day.
"A 'normal' construction site is going to be layer-by-layer-by-layer to build up. And here, the total box is coming and it is just plug and play, connecting." Some, like these, have three rooms and were made of three modules. Others, like this one, are single-module studios. "Here we have the bathroom." "Does the light work?"
"Not yet." "We're going to have to use our imaginations on this one, but I promise you it looks like a bathroom in there." The Lichtenberg project will be public housing built for Gewobag, one of Berlin's subsidized public housing organizations. Smaller apartments will rent for about two to three hundred euros a month. This organization manages 75,000 apartments, but this is their first foray into modular building.
Sebastian Schmidt's housing organization has over 150,000 tenants. This project will be finished in roughly three years, which according to Sebastian is about 20% quicker than comparable projects, translating to cost savings of about 20% as well. Modular building is new for Gewobag, but the project is surrounded by old-school Plattenbau. Is it just more of the same?
This is more sustainable and comprehensive than just pre-producing concrete walls - even if it's a spiritual successor to the post-war building boom. Clean construction and longevity weren't exactly front of mind when the Eastern bloc was building as fast as possible, and modular construction uses less energy once it's standing. It also cuts down on wasted time and material, wich means you have to be precise.
While a couple thousand people will live here soon enough, it's just a drop in the ocean of Berlin's housing crisis. Can this approach work everywhere in the city? Building such large factories is also a hefty up-front investment. So modular construction saves cash in the long term, but being able to set it up in the first place isn't always easy. Countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, which already use a lot of modular construction, have long invested in the infrastructure needed to make it happen.
Hype around modular construction is picking up in the US, but its growth has been a rocky road, with some major startups going under in the last half decade. Modular's emphasis on meticulous planning means savings only happen if your blueprints are perfect - a challenge for tech-influenced startups used to disrupting on the fly. Largescale modular construction is also tough when most American cities have tons of slightly different building codes and zoning laws to navigate.
Consolidating red tape needs to happen before you can standardize your construction processes. Other countries, like India, have different challenges: "When we are looking at the construction industry, it's not very central." Avlokita Agrawal researches green, sustainable housing and construction. "We may have to develop indigenous systems where the prefab or the modules can be generated at a smaller scale, and it is less capital intensive." Scaling down to apply modular concepts to the local level could help expand its use, especially in geographically varied countries.
"You have, you know, Himalayas in the north, which is extremely cold and then in the south, we are just eight degrees north of the equator. Modular construction could be really good, particularly for affordable [housing], but if we do not vary it with the regions and the climate within our country, it is not going to really help us." "It may not be simple, but we found out you can build a massive apartment building the same way you'd assemble a car." Modular construction shines when standardization makes sense: think more student dorms, social housing, or big projects with one developer
than highly customizable single homes. That's a lot of potential, if not perfect for everything. With enough planning and investment, we can put a roof over a whole lot of heads much faster and at a much smaller cost - also to the planet - than we currently are doing. "Are there any modular construction projects going near you? How are they going? Thanks a lot for watching, and don't forget to subscribe."
