Panel Discussion:

Lean Construction: Prefabrication & Modular Construction

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

- PANEL DISCUSSION TRANSCRIPT - Douglas Cooper: Pretty impressive stuff. What makes something like that possible? We hear things about efficiency in construction. We hear things about collaboration. We hear about prefabrication. We hear about modular. We hear about all of these things. Modular has been with us a while, but we're beginning to see this resurgence in modular and prefabricated construction, simply because now we have these wonderful tools and these technologies that bring that to fruition for us, like BIM that allows us to collaborate on a completely different dimension, and lean construction practices and that efficiency. We also have, we're driven by these green building things and sustainability and this desire to be more sustainable. My name is Doug Cooper. I'm the regional, lean major for Turner Construction here in the New York business unit. Tonight we're going to delve into this whole concept of prefabrication and a modular construction. We have a panel here that's going to share with us their thoughts.

We're not only going to talk about the prefabrication from as a concept and a means and method. We're also going to talk about some of the behaviors that we see as professionals when we get into a prefabrication or a modular construction type scenario so we can try to understand that a little bit. With that I'll allow the panel to introduce themselves. They'll give you about 3 minutes of background and then we'll get started with the questioning. Okay. Bob.

Bob Sanna: Thank you, Doug and thank you Charlie for having me here tonight. My name's Bob Sanna. I'm with Forest City Ratner Companies. I'm the Executive Vice President for design development and construction. We've been thinking about efficiencies and innovation in building systems for a while. We've most recently had a full modular building that we've completed with Turner now. We could talk a little bit more about that in a while. It really starts with looking at systems from the beginning. Some of the first things we did was challenge the notion of a brick wall and created brick pre-cast panels, which today are pretty common, same thing with exterior wall systems. Many of us, at least the older ones in the room, have all build stick system aluminum curtain wall and remember the inefficiencies of bolting all that together on site and now we have panel construction. The challenge is how do we ... And we've perfected that prefabrication notion. How do we take that thought pattern, that process and bring it to other building systems beyond structural steel and curtain wall fabrication. That's what I'd like to talk a little bit about tonight.

Sylvia Smith: I'm Sylvia Smith, Senior Partner at FXFOWLE. I'm the token architect. To set the scene, FXFOWLE is 140 person global firm. We pride ourselves in design excellence and also implementing environmentally responsible building practices and buildings. We do large scale products around the world. Many of

you know us from our large scale commercial buildings in the Times Square area, the recent, residential, beautiful complex at Greenwich Lane, the renovation of Javits, and now the design of Three Hudson Boulevard. We're also developing the framework for Governor's Island and Sunnyside Yards. Those are big, more commercially focused projects. In 1996, I started, I program focused intensive studio in the office and we really focused on cultural and educational work. Within that framework we've done projects from the Center for Global Conservation ... I always get trouble with my lists here. We're doing the Columbia University School of Nursing, the museum for the Statute of Liberty, major renovations now to Pace University and a number of campus projects in sub- Saharan Africa.

We've anchored a number of strategic collaborations. The Columbia University School of Business, which is soon going to start construction, and the redevelopment of Lincoln Center, and now we're beginning work on David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. We seek to bring the best out of the design and consultant team. We see value in those relationships and I think that's key to the things that we're going to talk about tonight. We also see great value in how our thinking melds with the thinking of the construction team and the subcontractors. This integrated approach is very reliant on belief and collaboration. I think we will talk about that further tonight. I also will say that our firm has been working since 2008 on a modular start-up company called Global Building Modules. We're looking for ways to create component parts that can fit together and create great flexibility in creating buildings in a modular, excuse me, an expedited fashion.

On the cultural side, perhaps the key driver on a current project is time. Our philosophy is: How can we look at a building as not separate elements, but as systems? How many of those systems can we fabricate off-site and bring onto the site and put together very quickly? As I was sitting here looking at the film, I'm hoping in a few years we'll be showing the film of that project showing the implementation of equally creative strategies. Thank you.

Mitchel Simpler: Good evening. I'm Mitch Simpler, managing partner at Jaros, Baum and Bolles Consulting Engineers. For the 2 of you out here who don't know who we are, we are 101 year old consulting engineering firm specializing in mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection. Some of our legacy projects include the original World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, the Mesaterm in Germany, Sony Center in Berlin, Bank of China in Hong Kong, which turns out to be the Branch Bank, and we did the headquarters in Beijing. We also have a large practice in institutional healthcare and health sciences, and have been privileged to work with virtually all the people in this room and on this stage. One of the unique things I think that we're going to talk about tonight, in terms of the concept of modular and offsite fabrication, this technology is not new. It's new to New York. Most of us have been employing that technology overseas for 30 to 40 years. I have privileged to work with JBB now for, I'm in my 40th year.

It's a real privilege to have been able to see this industry go through the changes that Charlie outlined earlier. I think this is truly going to be a break-through technology, not only form a construction standpoint, but also in the way we as designers formulate the design concepts and working with the construction team and designing a heads-up concept that plays into the modular and offsite prefabrication concepts. I think we'll dive into it pretty deep in the next hour and a half.

Robert Barbera: Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Rob Barbara. I'm responsible for the operation of the Turner Engineering Group. This division within Turner is a technical services group that provides design guidance and design knowledge for our design-build projects across the country. Our mission and focus is 3-fold. First and very simply is to manage and mitigate risk, design risk. Secondly we try and get a real jump on coordination, design coordination and related challenges. Thirdly, our focus is to try and optimize design to the best extent we can. We do so by collaborating with our design partners, like JB&B. We are not designers of record. Instead we inject ourselves into the process early on and really take the construction approach with design expertise and combine that with really obtaining the best engineered solutions for an efficient project. We have people from coast to coast within our group. We have geo-technical engineers, structural engineers, we have building envelope specialists as well.

We will provide analysis and technical review of our own Turner projects, again in an effort to obtain an efficient design. The concept of prefabrication really feeds very well into all of the things we do in design, build. It's all about, a lot to do with schedule, it's a lot to do with fast-track, and how can we be as efficient and collaborative as early on as possible? That, I think, we're going to hear a lot about today. Thank you. Doug.

Douglas Cooper: Great. We'll jump right into it. The first question is ... Forum panels, and I think I'll start with you, Bob. What do you see as some of the tangible benefits of prefabrication and modular?

Bob Sanna: Well, I think the obvious one that comes to mind first is the quality control. Again, with BIM technology we're building to a higher degree of tolerances. We're building inside. In most cases, most of this fabrication is happening either low to the ground or inside a building or inside a tent. I think that gives a more ergonomic way for workers to approach their work, and I think it's safe. I think there's an element of you can see it with the work that was stacked up in the video. There was complicated structural connections that were all made off-site, that making them above the river, you have to do some naturally, but a multitude of connections and work that was happening over the side and over the highway, albeit shut down, but pretty high in the air, could happen at an off- site location in a safer manner. Those are the primary things that I think prefabrication brings to the table.

Douglas Cooper: Alright, Sylvia.

Sylvia Smith: I think you have a great option of eliminating waste, both waste and effort, but also waste in material. I think that's an important aspect as we go forward. Buildings use many materials. We've all walked through construction sites where we've seen the debris in the ground. If you in fact could plan ahead, you could use your materials more effectively.

Douglas Cooper: That speaks to lean construction practices as well as sustainability? Right?

Sylvia Smith: Yes.

Douglas Cooper: Right. Mitch.

Mitchel Simpler: Well, for me it's all about schedule. The beauty of the concept of doing modular construction and off-site construction allows you to do parallel processes. While they are building currently toilet pods, penthouse, mechanical equipment skids. All that work can be done, not waiting for the structure to be erected, while they're digging the hole in the ground. We could be literally doing parallel processes, significantly impacting the schedule and turnover of the project to the owner, which for them it's about speed to market. The sooner they get their building open, the sooner they get it up and running and doing what it's intended to do. That's money in their pocket. It's really, to me, probably the prime reason to do it.

Douglas Cooper: Okay. Great. Rob.

Robert Barbera: Safety. You touched upon it a little bit, Bob. It's safety in so many aspects, I think. Number one, first of all the pre-planning that it forces there is critical, but so many components about less materials being fabricated and installed on site, the activity level of skilled craftsmen on site is reduced drastically. We're looking at a very big example of ... It doesn't' get any bigger than this. It think if you look at other components and I think we're going to talk about them today, whether it be bathroom pods or exterior wall components. Whenever we can take some of those activities and pull them off offsite, it's less risky activity that is taking place on site, whether it be on scaffold or otherwise. I think there are so many components about safety that factor in that it's a tremendous benefit.

Douglas Cooper: So we have a lot of tangible benefits that each one of you have put on the table. Why do you think there's this reluctance, if you will, to adopt prefabrication modular construction in the new york market? What do you think some of the issues are?

Mitchel Simpler: Well, I'd say certainly in the past the primary reason was that the trades were reluctant to do it. They didn't welcome it because they viewed it as a way of reducing manpower on the site. All I think it really does is transfer that manpower from the site into a more controlled environment. If you're able to do particularly repetitive piece of a project, so residential, perfect opportunity. Hospitals, the surgical rooms, we have repeated and repetitive product. You can build it in a better environment under controlled conditions. It takes as long to build the stuff, the same amount of labor essentially, but they're doing it in a much more controlled environment. From our perspective it doesn't reduce the labor forces significantly, other than in the field where you have the most difficult time, because you waste time getting staff onto the site, up the building, down the building. In a factory environment it's a lot more productive and better utilization.

Robert Barbera: I was going to say naturally it's pretty typical that when we want to do something differently, especially in this geography, there's a lot of skepticism. Until a vendor or a subcontractor sees something be success I think there's probably an apprehension to want to jump in with both feet. Until it gets proven out, until I think some can see others making money while doing it, there's probably an apprehension to want to get involved and see how they can do it themselves. We're seeing more and more of this, I think, in recent past, recent years. I think more and more I see people seeing the benefit. I think we're going to see an increase in the activity level.

Douglas Cooper: Okay. Bob.

Bob Sanna: I think a couple of things: One, culturally we're creatures of habit. Buildings that most developers can see and work on, really are singular products. They're one building and so they're not a highly repetitive item. Our industry has developed as a group of builders, and not so much the architects, but certainly the builders in the room look at a project and say, "It's a residential building. It's got to be concrete. It's got to do this. It's got to do that." We have a standard way that we look at it. The developers look at it that way as well. We've adopted this routine where we stratify the trades and break up the work in a certain way. I think to look modularly you have to look at the building systems differently. I think a good example of that is, again, in the movie when they were setting the big truss, if you were looking carefully you saw the fire spray, fire proofing was done, the sprinkler pipe was in, and the sprinkler pipe was painted red. There's, the building system isn't the painter.

What do we do? We go out and we bid the painting contract and they paint the pipes. In this particular case, that entire component was a building system. I think the biggest challenge to getting modular were may in fact be ourselves a little bit in terms of there is the, certainly the skepticism and we have to get our clients on board. There is also the fear of breaking into a new territory and repackaging a job not with the HVAC contractor and the concrete contractor, and the window manufacturer, but perhaps looking at the combination of systems that might work better and work integrated together and really look at our projects differently.

Douglas Cooper: Sylvia, any thoughts?

Sylvia Smith: Well, I think about the design process. Obviously if you're working with a modular system, the designers need to be sensitive to that, but I could see some bridling at the notion of starting out with a predetermined, preset kit of parts. In fact that could be a part of your architectural expression. I think there's a little concern about that. I also think that to do it well you have to believe in particularly in the systems notion to really do that well, that systematic thinking has got to begin with the architects and the engineers and the construction managers. As we were talking yesterday about the integrators, the people who are going to put those systems together. We, our office practices in that integrated mode, but in some of the things we're talking about in this current project, it's accelerated. It's bringing it earlier in the project. What that means then for a designer is, "Well, wait a minute. I can't make changes over here." The process is iterative. It requires, it's going to require a different way to think about how one approaches design.

Mitchel Simpler: There's a paradigm change here. You're thinking, you might be thinking about bathroom finishes in schematics. We have pods that have to be designed, fabricated, and stored in a warehouse somewhere so that they're ready to come on site. In that thinking, more component thinking or ... I think that's what you said, Bob, you're thinking about the building more of a component than in little, tiny pieces. It's a real change. All of the components, whether it be owner, design team, and construction manager, all of us have to think differently to be able to get there, not just for little components, but maybe big ones like that.

Douglas Cooper: I think, truly ... Oh, I'm sorry, Mitch.

Mitchel Simpler: The other pieces -

Bob Sanna: To truly take advantage of Mitch's concept of parallel paths, we have to actually think about something in a rather old fashioned idea which is not really starting anything until the plans are 100% done. That's something that we haven't done probably in years. We rush foundation packages out or a superstructure package out. I think to truly take advantage of all these parallel paths, one has to consider the option of getting all the plans done. I think ... Somebody used the term yesterday that I thought was great, was to slow down to be faster.

Douglas Cooper: Right. Slow down, speed up. Right?

Bob Sanna: Slow down to speed up.

Mitchel Simpler: You've got to slow down before you can speed up. The notion to date in New York, very few projects that have taken advantage of modular were actually designed out of the box to be modular, with the exception of what Bob and his team are doing. Certainly our experience has been, not only in New York, but outside of New York, it is used as a value engineering. If we can do it off site, we can have factory guys in Florida do it, have pump systems and all that. It was after the fact. It was never a part of the actual project planning process. I think the paradigm shift that you eluded to will begin by having the people that fabricate the modules be very much part of the design process and say, "Look, a pipe here versus a pipe there, doesn't make any difference from an engineering standpoint, but from a fabrication standpoint makes all the difference to us." That input, which they've been doing for curtain walls where there's design assist, having the manufacturers involved during the design process, I think will significantly influence how we do the design. All that will help improve the process. Again, it's about speed, getting it down so they can fabricate in a more efficient and repetitive manner, reduce the problems, and potential problems of offsite manufacturing. It's a win/win.

Sylvia Smith: I was going to add when the group comes together in that manner, there's a better understanding about the implications of a change. We tend to make changes, call the engineers and say, "Oh, we just moved a few rooms around. Can't you ..."

Mitchel Simpler: No big deal.

Sylvia Smith: No big deal. Address it and you use less space and I want a higher ceiling. We have that routine down. I think when ...

Mitchel Simpler: It's like a chess game.

Robert Barbera: By the way, it's free.

Mitchel Simpler: Opening gambit.

Sylvia Smith: I'm hinting here. I think when teams are working together in a more integrated way and you have the, we're calling them trade managers on this particular project that the implication of a change is understood by a broader scope of people. It's not that changes won't happen, because that is part of the process, but the change, perhaps, would happen with being informed by -

Douglas Cooper: Right.

Sylvia Smith: The input of many instead of a few.

Douglas Cooper: Right. Right. This shift in paradigm, I think, that Rob, you mentioned about taking these, moving away from the way that we currently see construction as these mutually exclusive elements that we bring together to make a building, and going to this whole system thinking. How do we make that shift? How do we do it in modular right now? Let's talk about that process.

Robert Barbera: Yeah, I think you got to start small. Again, I think we have to learn our way through some of the steps. We talked earlier about the concept of building a car. Now building a building is very different than building a car. A car goes down an assembly line. Usually buildings don't do that. Conceptually there are some things to learn here. Look at all of the planning and the pieces that are fabricated together as a car goes down an assembly line. The guy turns to his left, everything is at the right height and he installs it. There's things to be learned here. Think about if you went to a dealer, ordered a car and they were going to build the car the way we build a building. That's extreme, but you'd show up and you'd have 7,000 pieces of stuff on the floor and they'd say, "Come back in three months and we'll put all these pieces together for you. "You probably wouldn't feel too comfortable about driving the car out of the showroom. In a sense, we're almost doing that.

Again, it's a different concept and it's a lot more ... I think we're a little bit better than that. Again, I think there were some manufacturing productivity lessons to be learned, and we should be able to apply that. I think it's in steps.

Douglas Cooper: Okay. Any other thoughts about how we make that shift?

Bob Sanna: I think there's some low hanging fruit. I agree. You have to start small. I think there's been tremendous advantages in elevator machine rooms, oil plants that are prefabricated and packaged, air conditioning plants that are prefabricated. Even if we went back to the old-fashioned car, office building with the big toilet rooms, bathroom pods are commonplace everyplace except in New York City. You think about the density of trades from ceramic tile to plumbing to electric, and highly finished. When you think about that density of trades that are basically in a 5 by 7 space, and is very repeatable. Let's face it, in high-rise residential and hospitality, those are opportunities, I think for low hanging fruit. Dormitories are low hanging fruit to do more elaborate. I think if we can initiate it more, I think better thinking will come out of this. There's version 1 and then they'll be version 2.1 and 3.1. I think until 1 jumps into it and sees it as a common building system, I think one of the barriers might be encouraging the supply chain of these.

Where do we find these integrators or these manufacturers? I think developing the customer base will certainly encourage people to think about those businesses.

Douglas Cooper: Rob, you said something interesting about the whole, the manufacturing the automobile and that whole production model. Do you see a necessity in our industry to have that production model shift to something that's more similar to that sort of ...

Robert Barbera: As I said before, I think you got to pick your spots to get started. Some of the spots we've picked recently ... We have some projects in New Jersey that are very lean. I think you're aware of some of them. Taking prefabrication to very low hanging fruit, bringing fan-powered boxes out to a site that are completely commissioned, completely piped and wired, tested, balanced, ready to go and literally can be lifted up in place and flex-connected and move on. The BIM modeling obviously helps here, because dimensionally all of those things are known very much to accurate standards. That's really using, I think, some of the low hanging fruit that you're talking about and kind of mimics what I think what you're asking, but it is a more simple approach. I remember talking to the exec about the project and he had an issue with delivery dates on some of the boxes. He wasn't concerned at all. He built right around it. He knew exactly when that box showed up what the dimension he was going to lift up in place and it was not going to be an issue and he'd move on.

There's a lot of benefits to that. I think selecting those components is probably an early version of that. I'm not sure we're going to be building the car version of that in construction. I think there are things out there that are coming.

Mitchel Simpler: I also want to add to that, this technology has been used extensively outside of New York. I think it's incumbent upon all of us to leverage that. This issue of pre- built penthouses and boiler plants and chill plants, where you can build these facilities under controlled environments, wire them, pipe them, pressure test it, commission them, demonstrate that the software and everything is correct, shrink wrap it, break it down, bring it to the site. All that was at the tail end of the project that added to the schedule. We get a project, we get a better product, and we get it in less time. That technology exists. There's no reason why we can't leverage it today and we should.

Bob Sanna: From a marketing and branding point of view, though, I would encourage us again as builders, designers, and engineers to avoid the connection to the automotive industry. I think it connotes a certain amount of sane-ness. One of the things that we struggled with was the misconception of what modular is. People think about modular, think about trailer homes. They think about highly repeatable things. We all know that this is process innovation, not product innovation. We're building builders and what we tried to do would be to was to demonstrate that this wasn't an extruded box. It really did have the elements, including the geometry of the city street that introduced the diagonal. We tried to show that one could prefabricate something that was very site specific and a highly customized façade and all those things. I think when you talk prefabrication I found people go right to a completed product. I think starting smaller, starting with system integration.

I think being able to get our electricians to use these prefabrication wiring harnesses where the outlet box and the switch are pre-wired, they come, they're manufactured with the right length, they're tagged, they're marked. For those of us who watched our electricians cutting BX cable and that's the efficiency in that. That's prefabrication. I think trying to spread that word, that prefabrication could be as simple as pre-cut, pre-engineered pipe or electrical components. I think we can aspire to a place where a building is fully built. We like to brag that everything but the towel and the tenant came with the apartment when we delivered it. It wasn't quite that good, believe me when I tell you, but it could have been ...

Robert Barbera: You didn't have people in there when they dropped those.

Bob Sanna: It would be nice, but I think in some respects from a marketing and a branding, our own experience was people recoiled a little bit from that, that they will tell me how my product is really unique and different. That's why thinking about this as building systems and not as completed buildings – I think will help us educate our client base.

Douglas Cooper: Okay. Great. When we talk about prefabrication and modular, some of the things, I know that Charlie said when he did our introduction tonight and some of the things have been battled abound by the panel at this point. I keep hearing this thing about collaboration, about this ongoing collaboration. I know that with BIM and technology that we currently have, we have that ability to be able to collaborate it at a digital level as well. When we do have prefabrication we have this set of behaviors in that collaborative model that we're talking about. We're doing the pre-planning that allows us to pick tile earlier in the game. When we're digging the foundation we're picking tile. What are some of the behaviors that make prefabrication successful from the owner’s perspective, designer perspective, as well as from the cm or that building integrators perspective? I'll start with, I'll start with you Rob.

Robert Barbera: You start with me?

Douglas Cooper: Yeah. I'm down on this end the whole night.

Robert Barbera: I think we can do a better job of expressing the decision matrix better with our collaborators. What I mean by that is often we'll sit there and say, "We need this, we need that, we need this, and we need it by that date, and you're too late, and you're too late." We're late.

Mitchel Simpler: Somehow it's going to change now?

Robert Barbera: It's going to change now, from tonight forward, it's going to change.

Mitchel Simpler: I have 200 witnesses.

Robert Barbera: I think we can do a better job of expressing the reasons behind why this information is necessary, why we need it by such and such a date, and what we're going to do with it. I think prefabrication to some degree feeds into that. I think the better job we can do in doing that probably would amp up the collaboration a little bit. Think about the best project you've ever been on and why it was so efficient, either schedule wise, cost wise, or design wise. I bet it's going to come down to you had all of the spokes on the wheel really coordinated well and people were talking. They were talking very effectively. I think amping up that communication to another level and really understanding everyone else's perspective and by that I think being real clear on our decision making and why and what are the reasons behind that, and then following through is a component of that.

Sylvia Smith: I think I would define it slightly differently, and that is better projects happen when everyone's talking to each other, where it's not a command and control. It's not you saying, "I need this by this date," but that everyone realizes you've said, that they understand the goals. One of things that we're talking about on a very complicated project that will have to be done in a very short period of time is we're working around a co-location office. The architects, the engineers, the theater people are all going to be together. That may sound like chaos, but the idea is in short periods of time we can sit down and really be working collectively so that we understand. I think often we get backed into decisions where suddenly the architects are having to work out the fact that a column got bigger and they need to integrate it into the space, as opposed to, "What are we trying to do? What do we need to, what kind of clearance do we have, how do we want this space to look?"

I think if everybody has that skin in the game instead of the silos, whether it's in building or it's in the design side, will bring about better design, thinking on all levels. The architects like to think they're the designers, but in fact it's the collaborators. Lead and maybe anchor whatever, guide, cheerleader. I think that it's not just a matter of thinking about how the buildings are going to go together, but it's thinking about the process before you get to the construction. It's as Bob said, you're moving that part forward, that kind of integrated thinking forward. To me it's very exciting.

Mitchel Simpler: But the challenge for all that is going to be educating the client, because they are all accustomed to a certain process. Having them have now to front-load all their decisions, whether it's program, it's the mission. Look at the residential market as a key example. During the last downturn we were designing condos. Then a week later, "No, no, no, not condos anymore. Now they're going to be rental or it's going to be a hotel." Those big decisions are going to have to be locked in very early, because they then determine the rest of the process. We're really going to turn the owners a little bit in terms of their thought process and the decisions that they need to make very early in the process. It'll be interesting.

Bob Sanna: It speaks a little bit to the project, because certain projects if you're doing a retail shopping center, it's inherently full of change, because you're leasing and each tenant has different requirements. If you're doing a residential building if the owner is astute about their program, their apartment mix, you can pretty much establish that program. Certainly if you're doing an institutional building there's no reason why the client can't establish the program and know what that program is. I think prefabrication does start with a client that understands that they have a vision and some things are a complete vision that needs to get executed and designed. Some things are inherently full of change and they're going to have to proceed in a different way. I do think the way we do our design now, we do our weekly project meeting and the architect comes in, presents something, Bob Sanna says a lot of things, Mitch grumbles, and everybody leaves, goes back to their office, tries to solve the problem.

Mitchel Simpler: That's not going to change, Bob.

Bob Sanna: Even that process to some extent is filled with certain amounts of inefficiency so a laboratory might actually be a better way. I don't know what that laboratory is right now, but maybe this building is birthed in a laboratory where there's a different collaborative thinking that it's not the architect leading, but the architect as a component or spokesman for whether it's the aesthetic or the circulation organization, and the mechanical engineer really is the advocate for the system. I do think the way we work today inherently creates some of the -

Sylvia Smith: Bifurcation.

Bob Sanna: Some of the bifurcation that we experience.

Douglas Cooper: We show ourselves capable of doing this high level collaboration. We saw a film for Rockefeller University. That, somebody just didn't decide over night that that level of collaboration was going to occur. We're able to do it from a designer standpoint, from an owner standpoint, from a CM standpoint. why do you think there's a reluctancy of exhibiting those same behaviors on traditional stick, frame construction where we're not prefabricating anything? For instance, the bathroom pods go in, we pick the tile early, they get manufactured, but yet we can't seem to bring ourselves together to build the lobby. What are your thoughts with that? I think I stumped you.

Robert Barbera: I think there are some parts of the building that may not be so conducive to prefabrication. You talk about a lobby. That's a very special space. At the same time I think what we really want to get to is getting all of us to be operating and working as efficiently as we do when we're doing prefab -

Douglas Cooper: Correct.

Robert Barbera: When we're doing that lobby. That's more of where I think Bob is going and where I think you really want to be. How do you do that and why don't we? Probably because we have time and we're worried about the foundation drawings and we're worried about getting the vertical components coordinated. We're not thinking about it. The lobby, that's later. We'll worry about that later.

Douglas Cooper: Right. We make the decisions we have to make when we have to make them?

Robert Barbera: I think so.

Sylvia Smith: That's exactly it.

Mitchel Simpler: Yeah. Think about it as critical path and the difference between traditional stick built and modular construction is when you're doing modular you have multiple parallel paths. That critical path is no longer a straight line. It's now five lines. The things that you could push off later in the process, you may not be able to do that now.

Bob Sanna: If you bring that thinking to a stick built project, even if it is built conventionally, that need to resolve issues, to me I think it's as simple as, "Okay, we got all this coordinated. I have to run off now and work on the related project and I've got a sketch due someplace else." We ourselves as people, our work is very fragmented -

Sylvia Smith: Fragmented.

Bob Sanna: As well. I don't know how we change that, but no one can spend ... A painter works on a painting all day long. A sculptor works on a sculptor all day long. The auto people that you talk about work on that automobile all day long. We are for the most part fragmented a little bit, maybe our staff's a little less so. That's a little bit a part of it as well. It's that pull and push into all things that somehow keep you from saying, "Okay, I'm now done with the elevator, let me work on the mail room, let me work on the lobby."

Sylvia Smith: We talked about this yesterday that one of the things that has changed the way we approach work is the yellow sticky.

Douglas Cooper: The infamous Post-it.

Sylvia Smith: The Post-it. Yes.

Douglas Cooper: I like those.

Sylvia Smith: In this recent project ... I know you do. We did a poll schedule and we had a wall that probably was as long as this wall and each individual member of the team cited what they thought one of the most important milestones on the project was and then what informed that milestone. It was doing critical path without the linear aspect of it. At the end of the session there was a wall full of yellow stickies. Fortunately there was someone on the team who's trained at coordinating yellow stickies or Post-its. What came out of that was very legible and understandable guideline schedule that set up strategies. We continually have to fine-tune that and make it finer grain. Then it allows those who are working on four projects to know when they have to come in and what thinking is critical and ... There was something about the participatory aspect of that that brought appreciation across a much wider group of people. Then there was a little more ownership of not just that particular date, but of the whole process.

Now we're not ... We're at the beginning. We have many, many post-it notes to go in the project. I think we've ... Charlie talked about the computer tools. We think, "Okay, we'll put this information into the computer and we'll get that critical path schedule and that'll tell us how to do that project. In fact it probably is perpetuating some of this more linear, siloed, separated thinking. I think it could be a much more dynamic process. It does, it takes time and it takes a client who's committed to making it happen.

Robert Barbera: I think what you described is that forced collaboration that I was talking about earlier. When you're doing a pull plan and you get the leaders of the organizations to participate in it, there's a real commitment there. That's where I think when they see the leader of an organization putting a sticky on the wall and writing on it, there's a commitment there. Now the collaboration starts to take a different, I think, theme. His people or her people continue and before you know it you really got a plan now and you have ownership literally. I think any big task really should start with a pull plan for that reason.

Douglas Cooper: Yeah, you're connecting the team to the whole process, right?

Sylvia Smith: Yes.

Douglas Cooper: And then making that visual, right, which is real important. We're almost out of time. Any final thoughts before we open the questioning up for the audience?

Robert Barbera: We're ready, ready to start.

Mitchel Simpler: I was going to say that the conclusion is certainly as I listen to the panelists, it's not a question of whether it's going to happen. It's simply a question of when. I think we as an industry need to embrace the notion it's coming, it's going to happen, and how can we take advantage of having had the ability to think about it before everybody else, and set the stage and optimize, "What are the best ways to do this so that we as an industry benefit?" If we benefit, so do our clients. I think it's a win/win for everybody.

Bob Sanna: We didn't talk about labor very much tonight. We talked a lot more about it yesterday. As Mitch opened up the discussion, prefabrication was a difficult concept even five, ten years ago. I think, again, for the builders and those that are involved with labor, there's never been a better time, because the market share that they have lost now, the unionized worker to the open shop and non- union work is phenomenal. Creating an opportunity where prefabricated, where it could still be a union project, but with some prefabricated components, allows that aspect of at least saving some piece then of the market. Our personal experiences, I think you'll find the labor market receptive. I think you shove it down their throat. I think like everything else it has to be done appropriately and gently. I think now more today than ever, there'll be greater successes with the labor market as well.

Douglas Cooper: Great. All right. With that we can turn the lights up and we can take some questions from the audience. Don't everybody get up at once. I think I see a hand back there in the back.

Audience I'm following up on a question. I'm curious about on Rock Center, Rock Question #1: University, was that work, offsite work done with New York City building trade labor and how was that negotiated?

Mitchel Simpler: Our B2 work?

Douglas Cooper: Right.

Bob Sanna: We actually were very proactive about it and when we organized the business we elected to go right to the building trades. It took about eight months, but as I said earlier, they were receptive to the idea. They recognized, as Mitch has said, this is happening. They worked with us to devise a collective bargaining agreement. They established a wage rate. They understood that the benefit package couldn't be the same as those in the A-workers. We developed a set of benefits. We set up rules of equity, who would be represented. It turned out to be an amazing thing. We, of course the union workers, the A journey people had the right to enter the modular factory and of course the business was very busy and they didn't, but building trades had an envelope union. These were modular workers and they created a modular division. Jimmy Barnett from the Painter's Union ran the modular division. The people that came to work were actually community people.

As a developer you're often asked, "How do you get community involvement in the project?" You can't. We know the facts. We're a union developer. All of a sudden now we were able to source through the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other community workers, people we can train. Some did well, some didn't do well, but this was workforce development at its best. When people would walk through that factory we got so much credit for workforce development. The union was very satisfied that they had a market now that they were representing. I think the model's actually out there and they modeled it. We do have, the electricians have a shop rate and the carpenters who build millwork have a shop rate. Things that I didn't realize, they're buried out there. There are precedents for factory work here and it's a matter of leveraging those agreements. I actually think the model is created and they loved the notion of prefabrication in the city. This is the building trades.

Robert Barbera: On Rockefeller we fabricated those mods down in New Jersey. Charlie, when the labor that came there was local labor, but union labor from the locals down in that area. Obviously we barged up the mods.

Charlie Whitney: DCM could be wrecking on site. DCM built the modules off site.

Robert Barbera: Right. DCM did do the fabrication.

Douglas Cooper: All right. Yes.

Audience Hi. Thank you. Wondering what the delivery cycle would be like delivering these Question #2: pods to New York City's dense population and neighborhoods. How does that impact the construction of a modular build?

Robert Barbera: We're doing that right now with bathroom pods. It really needs a lot of planning. We're fabricating bathroom pods right now in South Jersey. We're having to store them. The delivery and transportation is the tricky part in this particular case. They need to be held for a time and need to be brought on sight when you need them. We're talking about in this particular case over 300 bathroom pods so there's a lot of coordination there. It's a challenge. It needs to be planned. It needs to be procured that way, but it's certainly doable. Once they get on site there's a claim by four or five different trades. We figure out how to coordinate all those pieces together.

Bob Sanna: Ideally you want to design it so that you're not a wide load, so you'd be no different than delivering a load of steel.

Robert Barbera: Right.

Bob Sanna: In our particular case every one of our units were wide loads so it took a little bit of doing, but we worked out a plan with DOT that allowed us to deliver four at night and four during the day. They actually saw the benefits of introducing less truck traffic. That's one of the benefits of bringing in prefabricated components, the sheet metal guy, the plumber, the drywall, it all comes in one place, not in five trucks. We were able to work with DOT to that extent. One of the big challenges, and you hit the nail on the head, is having sufficient cuing space. We were lucky out there. We had the Brooklyn Navy Yard, lots of real estate for lay down. We had 80,000 feet of an outdoor yard to cue up the completed product before it starts shipping. You've got a ... Like your sheet metal, you want half the job fabricated before he starts delivery. That's the same with module, but you can't put that all over the streets. Finding that location where you can cue it up. It's a little like staging steel, but that is the biggest challenge.

Douglas Cooper: Yes, sir.

Audience I've been, I know about you folks and I feel that the start of every project we're Question # 3: always ... Can everybody hear me okay? Thank you. At the start of every project you're reinventing the wheel. I don't know if everybody feels that way. It's amazing to me that we've been doing all we've been doing for as long as we're doing it and we still have to figure out every project how we can do it again. I commend you guys for trying to think differently and systematize the industry. Part of it is in prefabrication, but it's the systematization of the whole process from a developer’s decision to build something. Now there's a tremendous number of limitations. Bob touched on one, which is people’s time, availability. Another one is people's level of experience and expertise. What ends up happening is because of the different participants some are more experienced, some are not. Then you've got all those people in those organizations. Some are more and some are not. All of a sudden when everyone's working together there's a massive de-rating of capability and productivity.

Somebody who's more capable of working with somebody who's less capable and then there's a diminution of the result. There's a whole people component to this as well. We're an industry, we don't always look outwardly, especially in New York about how we can do things together. We're not always open to sharing, which is a real big problem, I think. Developers sharing, contractors sharing whatever, but there are other industries who are trying to solve this problem and I think largely ahead of the construction industry and how to solve it, technology- wise, for example. Look at some of the stuff that's being done with driver-less cars or rockets going to Mars or whatever. I think we could benefit from looking outwardly and partner with other industries and trying to formally put working groups together to help us do our jobs better.

Douglas Cooper: Thank you. That's great. That's a great suggestion.

Sylvia Smith: Great.

Robert Barbera: I'm really glad, Jonathan you didn't ask a question after all that, because I don't know that they would have been able to answer.

Sylvia Smith: Isn't Turner doing that in your innovation series? Douglas Cooper: Yeah, sure.

Sylvia Smith: Internally you're doing that.

Douglas Cooper: I think so.

Sylvia Smith: You're bringing thought leaders together. They haven't shared it with the rest of us, but within your company you're doing that.

Douglas Cooper: Yes.

Sylvia Smith: We'll have to get them to share.

Mitchel Simpler: That's the next one.

Douglas Cooper: I think there was a hand back there. Yes, ma'am.

Audience I have a question about structure. Presumably with each module, a module is Question #4: self-supporting through the logistics of having it moved and transported to the project site, et cetera. When you put 2 modules together, do you find that there are structural redundancies in excess that you have to work around? How does that work with your lean building concepts?

Douglas Cooper: That's a good one.

Bob Sanna: That's a really good question. We debate this in the office. Bathroom pods, for instance, if you'd think about building the bathroom pod and then you place it in an environment where there are other walls, you've effectively doubled the number of walls. That's certainly a challenge. One has to look at the efficiency of the fabrication versus the consumption of space. In New York City the reason we use concrete for residential buildings is our floor plates, our sites are so amorphic. We have to as developers squeeze out every piece of GLA. We'll have column grids that don't even resemble a square because we want to maximize every GLA. Modular, that becomes a little bit more difficult. There are elements of structural redundancy. We found in the modular building that it was actually a benefit having the structural redundancy. We were able to design for progressive collapse, things that are now current in the code. I would like to think that our structure isn't really over-designed, because it was able to be optimized.

There are certain levels of greater consumption, but I think there's a larger good that comes out by some of the lean construction methods.

Robert Barbera: Yeah, I would add to that when you're doing a structural mod like you did, there's a quality control plan that's a little different than probably what you're used to in a stick build approach. You probably want to give that a lot of thought. It's not going to be good if things like the units aren't racked properly once they're set, because you have a repetitive situation there that could get worse as you go up. I think there's a quality control plan that really needs to be thought of and it's going to be different than more conventional means, I think.

Sylvia Smith: I want to throw one other thing in here. I'm going to get myself in trouble. I might reference David Wallets who's in the audience in here who's a senior associate at FXFOWLE very much involved with our GBM system or the system that we're working with. It deals less with volumetric modules and more with a kit of parts that is put together and panels set in place. I think that that approach, perhaps thinking about it more as Legos is looking like it could save some of that redundancy. If I say anything more than that I'm going to get myself in trouble.

Bob Sanna: Think of Ikea. We struggle with those decisions. Do we flat-pack chassis? Chet's in the audience. He went through a lot of these discussions with us. Do we flat pack or do we ship volumetrically? Again, that's a great point that prefabrication and modular isn't volumetric. Everything could be pre-done, just like a piece of Ikea furniture and flat packed for the most efficiency and then assembled on site, but there's a lot less custom cutting, because it's all kitted up. That's a big component of modular is kitting all the parts from the suppliers.

Douglas Cooper: Questions? Yes, sir.

Audience Yeah, just real quick. When we talk about in terms of doing innovative stuff and Question #5: some of the barriers here in New York for lean construction, IPD is similar and then some of the other creative project delivery methods, I think it's important to think about risk allocation. When we talk about some of the barriers being ... I'm an attorney. I'm General Counsel to a company, so I think about this stuff all the time. I think it's important to think about when it comes to risk allocation with doing things innovatively we have to get other stakeholders in earlier in the process. Everyone here in this room is at the forefront of this, but possibly some of the subs and some of the other ancillary stakeholders might not be there yet. It's hard to then digest from a contractual framework, "Hey, go about having this innovative, collaborative process." I think everyone should make sure when they're doing this, they should be mindful of that.

Douglas Cooper: Right. Great. Good point.

Sylvia Smith: We talked about that.

Douglas Cooper: Yes, ma'am.

Audience When you were talking about the benefits of prefabrication, I noticed that none Question #6:: of you mentioned cost. My question is: in your experience how does the cost of your prefabricating projects compare with stick built? Does this play into the reluctance to adapt prefabrication?

Robert Barbera: I'll start on the cost thing.

Mitchel Simpler: We'll each give you a different answer.

Robert Barbera: Yeah, we each ...

Mitchel Simpler: Get four different answers.

Robert Barbera: I think it can cost less, but not necessarily. People, I think, are prefabricating whether it be an exterior wall component or some of the other things we've talked about today for the reasons that we've been talking about, whether it be ... I don't have to go over them again. Whether it be environmental, benefits, et cetera, et cetera. It's not necessarily costs though. I think there are secondary benefits of cost. For example, if you do a prefabricated wall, some of the secondary benefits of doing that wall is going to be taking Winter out of the equation or speed in which to erect the wall. As a product of that there's a benefit to schedule, which is a secondary component as a result of maybe cost efficiency and something down the road that's an impact of that. The wall itself costs more money than a wall that was stick built in place. I think the answer is it depends, and it depends on the component. That may not be the driving force or the reason why you head down that path. It may be some of the other parts we talked about today.

Mitchel Simpler: My answer, and I eluded to it in the beginning, it's all about schedule. To me the clear virtue of being able to run parallel paths versus a serial construction schedule is that you can bring your building to market much faster. It may not be less cost in terms of what I pay for the building proper, but in the project cost if I can deliver a building six months earlier and it's producing half a million dollars a day in rent, that's huge cost savings, but it directly benefits the owner. It doesn't change the physical cost of the building, because I'm doing the same amount of work, but I'm doing it in a more efficient manner. Definitely if you can impact a schedule favorably, it has a clear impact to the owner from a cost standpoint.

Douglas Cooper: With that, I think I'm going to wrap up the discussion and the questioning. I'd like to introduce Charlie Murphy, who's our Senior Vice President here for Turner. He is going to close up our program tonight.

Charlie Murphy: Thank you very much, Doug. Can everyone hear me? First we had a great panel tonight. Will you please give them a round of applause? We have two people from Turner who we talked about this concept. Do you think we could do an event at the Whitney Museum, a building that we built, and talk about something that people would really be interested in? Gorguin and Kristen, you guys took the ball and ran with it. Thank you very much for everything you see today. We heard about a lot of topics today and when we started off, Charlie Whitney said we had the thought leaders of the industry in the room tonight. I want to give the thought leaders a couple of things to think about as we go on. First of all, we talked about time. Time how prefab can save time. We also talked about time, how often do we give the time to do the things that we saw done on that screen at Rockefeller University or do the things that we did at the B2 building? How often do we give our staffs, our contractors, our designers the time?

How often are we just in time, that staff shows up in the nick of time to start the foundations or to start working on the ... You don't draft it anymore, but work on the CAD? Think about that. How often are we just in time? Does that advance the industry? How often do we give the people who work on these projects the opportunity to try something new, to try something different, to be uncomfortable? The counsel raised the question, "Have you thought about some of the barriers, the legal barriers that exist in our industry?" To a large degree, I think, we're fragmented because of the laws. What have we done, what can we do to give ourselves opportunity to collaborate more and maybe change some of the contracts that we all live under so that we can do bigger and better things together. Have we thought about that? I challenge that to the legal community. Please help us on that one.

Failure. How often have we said, "Try something new and it's okay to fail?" That's novel, right? As long as you fail fast and fail cheap. How often do we give our people that opportunity? How often do we think in parallel versus think in series? How often do we think about that lobby in the same way we think about prefabbing a bathroom? I've worked on a number of these projects and what I've come away with is the collaboration, the comradery, the working of the team from the workmen on the job to the chief engineer, to the owners of these companies and that spirit of collaboration. We're working at the Rockefeller University. You saw the film. We had Tim O'Conner came out and he's told every time he sees the workmen he reminds us of the motto for the greater good of humanity, science for humanity. How powerful is that when the workmen hears that, that that's what we're doing?

How often do we take the time? We're doing a project right now. How often do we take the time to share with the whole team the vision of really what's going to make this a great job? It's that time part again. Or do we just bark orders? We're the thought leaders. We're the ones who get to think about these things. We're the ones who get the opportunity to change the industry. Jeff, I thought you brought up some great points. It's funny, when we don't have the time we default to the same, "Let's get the foundations in and we'll start planning the rest of the building." We default to that mode. When we do take the time and we give people the opportunity and challenge them to be uncomfortable, we can come up with some great things. Thank you very much everybody for coming tonight. We have a cocktail reception. It's going to spill out into the gallery. It's a wonderful place. Please enjoy the Whitney Museum on us. Thank you.