There’s so much to be designed!
COVID-19 has simply accelerated this journey, or accentuated the need to move forwards at speed.As a result, the UK government is now looking to double down on the current plan to develop construction Platforms and to make things happen even more quickly.
This should send a strong message to the construction industry.This shift is coming.We've already seen other sectors - entertainment, retail, music - being disrupted over the last 25 years.
Rather than resisting the process, the big players of the construction industry need to acknowledge the reality of where we’re heading.They should be evaluating the types of opportunities this will create and figuring out how to shape themselves in order to take advantage of those opportunities.
They need to work out how to address the vast, global market that’s on the way.
We are now starting to see people considering these issues.. P-DfMA for the future.This building contains hundreds of thousands of samples, stored in vats of liquid nitrogen at -278o centigrade.
Currently, accessing the samples is a manual process which exposes the users to risk of asphyxiation due to their close proximity to the liquid Nitrogen.As the Nitrogen evaporates, a blanket of cold Nitrogen forms on the floor and rises upwards, thereby excluding the oxygen necessary for human life.. For the new facility, they wanted to make sure no-one had to go near the storage vessels.
So they commissioned a US company called Brooks to design a robot that could collect samples and deliver them to the scientist, in a way that’s a bit like a vending machine.Our challenge was to design and build the building around the robot system which was a world first and still in development.. Additionally, the way Bryden Wood have designed the extraction systems is a UK - and probably world first.