From Marriott’s widespread adoption of modular hotel rooms to the emergence of factory-built homes in New York City, prefabrication and modular technology seem to be popping up everywhere. DIRTT Environmental Solutions — a 15-year-old Canada-based company whose acronym stands for “Doing It Right This Time” — is encouraging its clients and colleagues to look at modular construction from a different point of view, by producing modular walls and rooms that can be reconfigured in hours. Imagine instantly turning a hospital ward into a triage unit or turning an empty shell of a building into a functioning school in a matter of days.
The company’s vice president of development and co-founder, Geoff Gosling, told Digital Trends that the concept of DIRTT originally came from the founders’ experience in building command and control spaces for applications like 9-1-1 operations and NASA space launches. Because these spaces are in operation 24/7/365 and are technologically and ergonomically intensive, they’re challenging to reconfigure.
Those constraints inspired Gosling and co-founders Mogens Smed and Barrie Loberg to look at modularity from a different point of view.