It’s no surprise to church designers that we are practicing our craft in a time of unprecedented change, but construction has its own transformation occurring.
Here are five trends to watch:
1-Gains in efficiency - modular building and prefabrication
Texas Health Hospital in Mansfield, Texas—due to open in late 2020—features patient bathrooms and medical headwalls built using 100% modular construction. Once it is ready for installation, the prefabricated materials are flown into place, and the work in this area is complete.
Texas Health Hospital in Mansfield, Texas—due to open in late 2020—features patient bathrooms and medical headwalls built using 100% modular construction.
While churches are a long way from being assembled like a Lego set, there is a trend toward construction companies adding prefabrication to their services. Popular faith-based architect and builder, The Beck Group, recently established Factory Blue—an integrated off-site manufacturing company that sources, manufactures, and installs modular building components. The bulk of Factory Blue’s work has been with Beck’s healthcare practice, including Texas Health Hospital Mansfield, but as prefabrication matures in construction, it is sure to spread to other areas.
“Factory Blue helps our teams standardize replicable areas of their buildings, so the unique and important aspects of a project remain priorities with design and construction. For example, Factory Blue will fabricate and install a modular freight elevator. This allows the team to prioritize design and construction focal points, like a baptismal font in a church,” says Tim McNew, director of Factory Blue.
2-Start with something else—adaptive reuse
With a migration of people back into urban areas, there is renewed desire by clients to capture and reuse existing building stock—which has its own unique construction challenges. The process of retrofitting old buildings for new uses can be almost as costly as building on a greenfield site as teams work to retain a structure’s integrity while meeting the needs of a new occupant.
unsplash.com; image: Kieran Sheehan
Many churches have had success with adaptive reuse. Watermark Church in Dallas began its campus with the purchase and adaptation of an office tower. Life.Church reclaimed a defunct movie theatre for its campus in Fort Worth. The Village Church renovated an abandoned grocery store into its Flower Mound Campus. Each of these required substantial investment but allowed the churches to afford a location that simply wasn’t available as a greenfield project. They moved into existing neighborhoods with density.
Deloitte predicts that in the next decade 90% of commercial development projects will be renovation or adaptive reuse.
Construction companies who specialize in adaptive reuse have as much innovation on the logistics side as they do in the coordination of building trades. Creative addressing of staging areas, working with the city on traffic management, and orchestrating execution with minimal disruption to surrounding properties is an art form that many construction firms have begun to specialize in. Deloitte predicts that in the next decade 90% of commercial development projects will be renovation or adaptive reuse.
3-Eye in the sky - use of drones
The Drone II 2019 Market Report predicts that the global drone market will grow from $14B in 2018 to over $43B by 2024 — and the construction industry leads the pack, with adoption growing 239% in the last year. Contractors can leverage this tool in numerous beneficial ways by linking footage to software like Drone Deploy or Pix4D to capture progress footage, identify heat loss locations, monitor safety, and more.
"We’re able to create aerial records faster, more often, and at significantly less expense than before. This is particularly valuable for our clients who are unable to visit the site as often as they’d like.” Keyan Zandy, COO, Skiles Group, Dallas, TX
“It’s amazing how quickly drones have changed the construction industry, especially when you consider that this technology is so new,” shares Keyan Zandy, COO of Skiles Group, a Dallas-based construction firm. “The biggest impact we’ve realized is simply their usefulness in documenting a project’s progress. We’re able to create aerial records faster, more often, and at significantly less expense than before. This is particularly valuable for our clients who are unable to visit the site as often as they’d like.”
Drones aren’t simply used for their ability to “see” things. There is increasing use of them for transport. Rachel Burger writes for The Balance, “Since drones are generally small with high levels of maneuverability, they are being used more and more as an alternative to traditional vehicles. Even better, drones do not have to adhere to traffic laws, which allows them to make deliveries in a fraction of the time, using half of the resources.”
4-Documenting in 3D - 360-degree photography & laser scanning
Taking 360-degree images regularly is an easy way to document a project’s progress, as well as to record the locations of utilities inside walls or under floors. When imported into software like StructionSite or Holo Builder, they can also be used as a punchlist tool where images can be tagged with deficiencies and responsible parties.
“The photos we generate with 360-degree cameras have proved to be a powerful tool to share with our client facility managers. With these, they are now able to ‘see’ behind walls and in ceilings with more accuracy than as-builts could ever provide,” says Zandy. “From a maintenance perspective, their value is tremendous.”
Similarly, laser scanning allows construction companies to enter buildings and capture 3D models accurately directly from the existing construction—which is a big win for older buildings that may have shifted, had undocumented minor renovations, or who are old enough that drawings no longer exist.
5-Improving safety through tech wearables
Any time people are working with things larger than human scale there is physical risk, which is why the best construction firms place safety at such a high value. Safety-oriented wearables are becoming more affordable and more prevalent on jobsites. And they help protect workers from head to toe.
Technologies such as Redpoint Positioning can be embedded in safety vests to provide GPS location tracking and offer emergency alert systems to notify workers of hazards.
Zippkool offers cooling gear products that help workers maintain safe body temperatures. Technologies such as Redpoint Positioning can be embedded in safety vests to provide GPS location tracking and offer emergency alert systems to notify workers of hazards. Spot-R’s belt clip sends a real-time alert message when it senses a worker has slipped, tripped, or fallen, improving response time. And SolePower makes work boots that include GPS, Wi-Fi, safety lighting, and motion sensors charged by kinetic energy as the boots strike the ground.
The future follows the client’s interest
As the costs of materials and labor rise, construction firms are seeking innovation to be able to provide more for their clients with greater efficiency. Technology is both responding to and fueling that innovation. As it develops, it will change the game for church facilities.
