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 (including both research practices and education practices) in the New York metro area. The CfOC guides community outreach and industry partnerships to produce standards and to answer the national and international demand for the next generation of offsite professionals, researchers, and teachers.

Mission

• To introduce urgently needed open-source, collaboratively drafted standards, based on project experience, to align industry efforts in the adoption of offsite methods. Then to hand over such standards to the ANSI, ISO, or similar standards organization for growth, maintenance, and versioning.
• To graduate 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.
• To sponsor and participate in world-class offsite construction research, 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 a new type of lending 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.

Meet the Team

---

---

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.

Support the Center

• The Center aims to gather a wide range of support from all the 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 new 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, and/or funds to launch the Center for Offsite Construction in its initial projects:
  • Amie Gross Architects
  • Danny Forster & Architecture
  • Eisenman Architects
  • Humans of the Internet
  • Studio A+H

Location

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