Industrialised Building in the Housing Sector - Lessons Learnt

The Lessons Learned are in both industry practice of industrialised building as well as academic research. We visited Harbin Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University and we shared each of our research programs and discussed potential future projects. An important difference between China and Australia is that off site manufacturing (OSM) is termed Industrialised Building. In China, in the 1970s industrialised building became an important way of thinking to solve the problem of leaks in high rise apartment buildings. It was considered that on site construction work practices were the problems and that more quality control was needed by developing products and systems in a controlled factory environment. In the last 5 years two other important factors began to emerge as key challenges construction stakeholders needed to address namely; 1) labour costs were beginning to rise and 2) environmental sustainability problems and in particular energy consumption and air quality in highly populated urban concentrations. Industrialised building once again became an important area of focus. A White paper was developed five years ago by Professor Ma on industrialised building which gave direction to the policy development and the new 5 Year Agenda on Industrialised Building. There is a strong connection between the research organisations, research conducted on the concepts of Industrialised buildings and Building Information Modelling and the industry policy developments – there is close liaison and support for the research. It was considered that on site construction work practices were the problems and that more quality control was needed by developing products and systems in a controlled factory environment.