Center for Offsite Construction

Vision

Industrialized construction is a rapidly growing, highly durable trend improving the design and delivery of U.S. buildings. The Center for Offsite Construction (CfOC) acts as an epicenter for effective offsite construction practices in North America, including research practices, consensus building, and education. The CfOC guides community outreach and industry partnerships to produce standards, publications, and collaboration. It exists to answer the expanding nationwide demand for the next generation of offsite professionals, researchers, and teachers.

To learn more about the Center’s vision for the future of construction productivity, read Modular 2.0.

Mission

To make architecture and buildings that are affordable to everyone and sustainable for our planet.

The Center’s niche involves being the best organization in the nation at producing well-researched, cross-platform, effectively implemented offsite construction technologies. Its resonance involves establishing a hub of shared knowledge around off-site construction and serving as a catalyst for the industry.

In doing so, the Center focuses on:

• Introducing urgently needed open-source, collaboratively-drafted standards, based on project experience, to align industry efforts in the adoption of offsite methods and collaborate with the ANSI, ICC, ISO, or similar standards organization for sustained growth, maintenance, and versioning.
• Fostering critically needed technologies in supporting areas for offsite construction. These include new methods of finance, the evolution of legal frameworks, marketplace organization, supply chain diversity, software development, and others.
• Graduating qualified professionals in the field of designing and delivering buildings with offsite methods. To equip those graduates with rigorous knowledge and skills to occupy key jobs in the local, state, federal, and international organizations, as well as in the private sector, in architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and related fields.
• Sponsoring and contributing to world-class offsite construction gatherings, symposia, and workshops. In doing so, to provide a venue for research activities and endeavors for students, professionals, and peers promoting efficiencies in building practices.

Goals

• Establish well-designed standards that ease collaboration in the field, expand offsite construction markets and product offerings, and promote the wide adoption of offsite construction techniques.
• Catalyze new types of lending, contracts, and software for offsite construction that embraces innovative applications of modular technology.
• Improve undergraduate and graduate programs that offer the knowledge of modern industrialized construction methods.
• Design and execute research projects producing data-driven outcomes, industry-focused software, and outside investment—as partnerships, grants, or licensing.

To learn more about the Center’s roadmap for realizing measurable gains in construction productivity, read Modular 2.0 Roadmap.

Research Opportunities

• The Center for Offsite Construction is focusing research in FY 2025 on maturing modular connectivity standards, increasing access to lending programs, and furthering innovation within manufacturing processes.
  • With a healthy research program in place for standardizing the ways buildings host modular products, the Center welcomes the involvement of industry professionals and prototype engineers in advancing this work.
  • The Center’s work in mapping the existing lending programs for U.S. modular construction has revealed large gaps between production innovation and modular project delivery. New lending programs must be developed to fill this gap and ensure comprehensive support for future projects.
  • A five-year feasibility study of current modular practices is reporting early conclusions on missed efficiencies in U.S. modular manufacturing practices, calling for a new description of best practices for 21st-century offsite construction.
• As the Center takes a holistic approach to the complete delivery of modular buildings, we highly value collaborators with training that illuminates innovation in the financial delivery of buildings, the technical administration of construction projects, and the dynamic engineering challenges involved in moving large pieces of buildings.
• To apply to become a research fellow at the Center for Offsite Construction, please forward a CV of past work experience and publications, a portfolio of relevant projects delivered, and a proposal for research topics to be explored with Center resources to Mathew Ford, Managing Director at mford05@nyit.edu.

Academic Program Support

In every discipline, the experience born from research, collaboration, and project delivery enriches classroom experiences.

The Center for Offsite Construction staff are research professors and practitioners. They are tasked first with supporting architectural and engineering practices that engage real-world project delivery issues. Then CfOC staff must bring these topics to their teaching—with lively classroom discussions, contemporary collaborative projects, and networking opportunities with fellow students, faculty members, and industry professionals.

The center serves as a New York City hub for these exchanges, where contemporary practitioners of building information modeling (BIM), virtual design and construction (VDC), and manufacturing disciplines engage the U.S. affordable housing crisis, the post-COVID push to convert disused office space and other urgent applications.

Student Researchers

• Nicole Acosta, Architectural Technology
• Greg Brown, Architecture
• Sindhu Maradi PC, Energy Management
• Despina Melissinos, Architecture
• Amrutha Nagamalli, Management
• Emanuel Nektalov, Construction Management and Architectural Technology
• Arth Patel, Digital Art and Design
• Harshil Thumar, Computer Science

Support the Center

• The Center aims to gather a wide range of support from all types of entities that will make the 21st-century construction industry more sustainable.
• Financial support is needed in two areas: 1) at the advisory level to help launch new projects, and 2) at the project level to help propel innovations forward and bring them to conclusion.
• Technical expertise is needed to support existing connectivity standards projects, requiring a wide variety of experienced collaborators. We welcome new introductions to real estate developers, general contractors, prototype engineers, financiers, and other researchers to detail innovation.
• For more information, read this white paper: “Open Source Connectivity Standards for the U.S. Offsite Construction Industry“
• For questions or to support the center, contact Jason Van Nest at jvannest@nyit.edu.

Initial Supporting Partners

The following organizations have given their time, interest, advice, or other resources to launch the Center for Offsite Construction in its initial projects:

ANSI Accreditation

The Center’s mission focuses on introducing urgently needed open-source, collaboratively-drafted standards. To support that focus, the Center is in process for accreditation by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standards developer. The Center is committed to adhering to ANSI’s Essential Requirements for openness, balance, coordination, consensus, and due process. Participation of the various stakeholders in an accessible, equitable, and responsive environment is crucial in developing consensus for an American National Standard.

The Center invites interested parties to collaborate in our standards development processes, please contact Managing Director Mathew Ford at mford05@nyit.edu for more information.

Location

Center for Offsite Construction
New York Tech School of Architecture and Design
1855 Broadway, Room 1108
New York City, N.Y. 10023
USA