Last week, construction of the world’s tallest modular buildings was completed in Singapore.
The Clement Canopy building consists of two 40-story towers with 505 luxury apartments, located in the heart of this city’s residential and Kent Ridge Education Belt districts. Each tower is 459 ft tall, and combined they are made up of 1,899 modules whose weight ranged from 37,000 to 64,000 lbs.
UOL Group, a leading real estate and property management firm in Singapore, is the project’s client as part of a development joint venture with Singland Homes. ADDP Architects was the project's architect.
Clement Canopy is the first structure on the island to use an all-concrete version of the Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) system, where freestanding modules, complete with finishes for walls, floors, and ceilings, are produced offsite and then assembled onsite, according to Concrete Construction magazine.
In April 2016, the Singapore government awarded Dragages Singapore, a subsidiary of France-based general contractor Bouygues Bâtiment International, the contract to design and build Clement Canopy. Aurélie Cleraux, Bouygues Bâtiment’s head of modular construction, tells BD+C that more than 60% of the two towers’ superstructure was built offsite. The modules were cast by a concrete precast manufacturer in Senei, Malaysia, in five days. (The project required a total of 48 module shapes.) The fitouts were completed in the contractor’s factory in Tuas, Singapore, within 15 days. The modules included mechanicals and plumbing, plastering, painting, and bathroom fixtures and tiles.
The contractor used two Liebherr 1000 EC-H 40 Litronic High-Top tower cranes to erect the towers. The Clement Canopy project was delivered in 30 months, six months ahead of its initial timeline. Cleraux says most of this period was spent in designing and planning.
Cleraux explains that there’s a big push by the Singapore government to improve construction productivity. And the benefits of modular and prefabrication processes, he says, are that they can reduce construction time by up to 50%, and reduce onsite labor by 30%. Other benefits include reduction of jobsite noise, pollution and neighborhood disruption; improvements in jobsite safety and the quality of the finished product, as well as the possible reuse of the building’s materials down the road.
In February 2018, Dragages Singapore won a €13 million ($9.6 million) contract to build six more 15-story residential buildings in Singapore whose reinforced concrete structures will be 65% factory built.
“We are going to see a complete disruption in the next few years: our clients expect ever more efficient and faster building solutions,” Nicolas Borit, CEO of Bouygues Bâtiment International, told Global Construction Review last year. “Through the experience we have acquired on a number of projects, we are able to provide modular construction solutions today which fully meet their expectations, from design through to the construction of the final product.”
These six buildings were expected to take 33 months to complete.
Related Stories
| Oct 16, 2014
Perkins+Will white paper examines alternatives to flame retardant building materials
The white paper includes a list of 193 flame retardants, including 29 discovered in building and household products, 50 found in the indoor environment, and 33 in human blood, milk, and tissues.
| Oct 15, 2014
Harvard launches ‘design-centric’ center for green buildings and cities
The impetus behind Harvard's Center for Green Buildings and Cities is what the design school’s dean, Mohsen Mostafavi, describes as a “rapidly urbanizing global economy,” in which cities are building new structures “on a massive scale.”
| Oct 12, 2014
AIA 2030 commitment: Five years on, are we any closer to net-zero?
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the American Institute of Architects’ effort to have architecture firms voluntarily pledge net-zero energy design for all their buildings by 2030.
| Oct 9, 2014
Regulations, demand will accelerate revenue from zero energy buildings, according to study
A new study by Navigant Research projects that public- and private-sector efforts to lower the carbon footprint of new and renovated commercial and residential structures will boost the annual revenue generated by commercial and residential zero energy buildings over the next 20 years by 122.5%, to $1.4 trillion.
Sponsored | | Oct 7, 2014
Containing healthcare crises with modular units
With the recent news of the first Ebola case diagnosed in the U.S., there’s a lot of chatter about the possibility of a widespread outbreak in America. SPONSORED CONTENT
Sponsored | | Oct 1, 2014
Make space for Williams Scotsman
Can you guess what enables groundbreaking medical procedures, instruction of our future leaders, and meeting space for energy exploration professionals? The answer is modular space solutions. SPONSORED CONTENT
Sponsored | | Sep 30, 2014
How project managers can manage technology
Not long ago, the role of a construction project manager revolved around working with people: employees, vendors, consultants, designers, subcontractors and owners. Today, project managers primarily manage information. SPONSORED CONTENT
| Sep 24, 2014
5 business lessons from a 43-year Star veteran
Mary Ed Cain was supposed to be born a boy. That was the first time she surprised everyone. The second time came on a daily basis during her 43-year career at Star Building Systems. SPONSORED CONTENT
| Sep 24, 2014
Architecture billings see continued strength, led by institutional sector
On the heels of recording its strongest pace of growth since 2007, there continues to be an increasing level of demand for design services signaled in the latest Architecture Billings Index.
| Sep 22, 2014
4 keys to effective post-occupancy evaluations
Perkins+Will's Janice Barnes covers the four steps that designers should take to create POEs that provide design direction and measure design effectiveness.
