Offsite manufacturing: Envisioning the future agenda

Off-Site Manufacturing (OSM) as a concept/approach is certainly not new, the origins of which rest in literature under various incarnations and typologies. Earliest examples include provision where ������ a panelized wood house was shipped from England to Cape Ann in 1624 to provide housing for a shipping fleet��� (Arieff, and Burkhart, 2003), through to the importation of housing in Australia (circa 1837), the delivery of Crystal Palace for ���The Great Exhibition��� in the United Kingdom (UK) (circa 1851), and for mainstream housing in the United States (US) with initiatives such as the Sears Modern Home ���kit house��� (circa 1908) and Lustron Home (circa 1945). However, there are several different terminologies in current use which describe OSM (Gibb and Pendlebury, 2006; Taylor, 2010); including: modern methods of construction, pod technology, off-site construction/fabrication/production, industrialised building systems, modular construction, pre-cast panels/foundations, volumetric/hybrid construction etc