In collaboration with the Technical Studies team of the School of Architecture + Cities, the Fab Lab participated in a knowledge exchange tour of construction company Laing O’Rourke’s Explore Industrial Park. This is the ‘most automated concrete facility in Europe’ and represents a huge investment in DfMA and off-site manufacturing. The factory has already delivered large Crossrail, airport and hospital projects with further aims to expand into housing, in order to meet the government’s ambitions of accelerating house building in the UK.

Designed to reduce waste in the construction process and drastically reduce project lead times the approaches developed by Laing O’Rourke here focus on the efficiencies of the standardisation and scaling DfMA can offer with their ‘70:60:30’ goal.