Hospital Design and Construction | Zig Rubel, President and CEO of Forsight Digital

Smaller businesses trying to identify the best premises to buy or lease..

Intelligent design and automated fabrication remove the need for human ‘interpretation’ of drawings, increasing accuracy and consistency, for greater safety and productivity.Platform II was designed to use basic materials with the minimum amount of fabrication where possible.

Most components use no or low levels of fabrication (these can be thought of as ‘dumb’ components).These components tend to be the large, heavy, commoditised elements including:.Columns - standard square hollow sections are used with little/no ‘fabrication’ (a single hole is punched or laser cut in each column);.

Beams are made using a standard rolled metal profile (metal coils are passed through a highly efficient, automated rolling process with virtually no waste, no double handling etc.)as a permanent shutter for concrete.

As much ‘intelligence’ as possible is then placed in the interfaces (e.g.

bracketry which is self locating to control tolerances and is colour coded to ensure correct application etc.)Since mandating BIM back in 2011, the UK government has played a crucial role in the effort to turn a Platform approach to construction into a reality.

There’s been a real consistency to their approach and they have continued to focus their spending power to promote Modern Methods of Construction.Moreover, the Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA) who, to some extent, hold the purse strings around infrastructure spending, have also been pushing the construction Platforms agenda..

In Asia, we’ve seen the Singapore government encouraging ‘Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction’ (PPVC), and we’ve also seen a focus on Modular Integrated Construction (MIC) in Hong Kong.Both markets have geographical constraints.