Bryden Wood are strengthening their presence in the US by opening a new headquarters in Boston, MA, in the coming weeks. Bryden Wood board director Jaimie Johnston MBE, together with Phil Langley, board director and head of creative technologies division, will lead on their US expansion.
Equinix, Amazon Web Services, Boldt, Chandos, and DPR Construction are already working with Bryden Wood on industrialized construction projects. The new US HQ will allow more US clients to benefit from a market-leading approach.
"This move puts us at the centre of an industry that embraces change – with large, tech-led clients working in innovative ways and moving quickly," says Jaimie Johnston. "Being a US-registered company, with global teams, will enable us to take a leadership position for our US clients."
Industrialised construction
Bryden Wood's vision for industrialised construction brings together a platforms approach to design and construction, driven by digital configurators, and delivered using new commercial models such as Integrated Project Delivery.
Platforms are kits of parts composed of manufactured components. The approach offers standardisation at component level and design freedom at asset level. With platforms, manufactured, tech-rich components are assembled highly efficiently and accurately on a site with fewer operatives, working in better conditions, more safely. Platforms offer more certainty that projects will deliver on time and on budget; with reduced carbon and re-use embedded in a project at the earliest stages of design.
They are working with large, tech-led US clients to develop automated design technologies, such as digital configurators, that help global companies decide how, when, and where they develop their construction pipelines, in a fraction of the time it would take to assess viability traditionally. Design configurators use genetic algorithms to generate thousands of design and engineering solutions for sites around the world.
The approach to data centre design and delivery has already delivered benefits to data centres across Europe, with significant increases in IT yield, productivity and speed to market, and reductions in carbon, energy consumption and waste.
"We're consistently being asked the same questions by our US clients and general contractors – can you develop a kit of parts approach, and drive it using configurators? How will this approach reduce the time and costs to deliver my assets?" continues Johnston. "Clients are seeking the same benefits of continual improvement that have allowed other industries to flourish. By developing solutions that allow appropriate levels of repeatability, without sacrificing design quality, we are helping them transform their businesses."
Forward-looking clients
They are working with: The Boldt Company, a leading contractor and lean construction expert, on a major manufacturing facility in the US; major Canadian constructor Chandos; and supply chain innovator and digital platform creator, KatalystDI.
Bryden Wood are also partnering with TerraPraxis and MIT on 'repowering coal'; a major initiative to cut global carbon emissions by repowering coal-fired power plants with small modular reactors. This is a project with a critically urgent timeline, made feasible by their expertise in automated design and standardised construction.
Using standardised sets of manufactured components will create a new, open marketplace and new supply chain possibilities. These are already being explored by forward-thinking consultants in the US who are linking their clients directly to the supply chain to map out the industrialised construction process.
Scalability is where platforms and configurators really demonstrate their benefits. The data centre, healthcare, energy, and pharma sectors are all industries with huge potential to improve design and delivery through industrialised construction.
Dissatisfaction with the status quo coupled with the right commercial models, a hunger for innovation, and the desire for scalability, mean the US construction sector is ripe for major change.
Phil Langley says: "Clients want more control in the way they make key decisions about their future assets. They want to get to market faster, be more productive, and achieve their climate goals. This means developing new, ownable, creative technologies to enable automated design. We develop algorithmic design software for the global data centre and transport sectors that simply isn't being developed anywhere else."
Original Source: www.brydenwood.com
