Recent power outages in Spain and Portugal highlight the critical issue of grid inertia, a challenge exacerbated by the increasing integration of renewables like solar and wind power, which lack the 'spinning' stored energy of traditional turbines.
This presents an additional challenge.. Marks says it’s particularly problematic due to the siloed nature of the ecosystem.She doesn’t want the language of industrialised construction to hold anyone back, or create barriers, and feels it’s simply a matter of adapting and changing a few behaviors.. Prioritising Design to Value with lean construction principles.
Jaimie Johnston recognises that people are becoming bogged down in the granularity of the words, even with terms like ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site.’.The important thing is to fully understand the outcomes clients are aiming to achieve, he says, be it speed, greatest flexibility, or lowest costs.That’s why Bryden Wood likes the term.
Design to Value.The goal here is to design things with lean construction principles: using the least amount of material, handled the fewest number of times, delivered quickly, with the right information, and without waste.. Aiming to realise these lean construction goals, regardless of whether that occurs on-site or off-site, is the real objective.
Once this level of understanding is in place, informed decisions can be made about the most effective ways to go about making things happen.. Johnston says this includes decisions about the level of granularity of component standardisation which is required, as well as whether work is best done on-site or off-site.
It’s really about individual value drivers and these vary from client to client depending on their needs.. “Construction too easily gets into the solutions mode,” he says, “and starts thinking of the solution before answering the question.”.The facility generously houses five theatres, thirty inpatient and twenty day case beds, fifteen consulting rooms and an extensive rehabilitation department.
Describing the process of layout design for the hospital, Wood notes that the more Bryden Wood understood about the hospital and its patients, the more they were able to ‘codify their operations, their adjacencies and their spaces…’ He discusses the fact that Bryden Wood were able to benefit from a considerable amount of consultation and direct input from the professionals who were actually going to be using the facility.All of that knowledge was then enshrined into a three dimensional design tool, he says, which became like a ‘vocabulary of spaces…’.
Wood also describes how such a level of understanding about the function of the building, led logically to the next step of applying a level of systemization to its construction, in order to underpin it and make construction more efficient.‘We understood...the scale and the spans that the structure would require’ he says.