Military dormitories in San Antonio, Texas could offer valuable lessons in industrialized construction.
- Layton, Gensler, and VBC are beginning a huge modular project in Texas at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston military base, with ambitious targets for fast delivery and lower costs.
- Success will require balancing production, delivery and sitework schedules, which is no small matter with a job of this size.
- The announcement signals confidence in offsite construction, but execution will show whether the approach can reliably deliver at scale.
Every few years, the modular industry announces a project that the participants claim will change everything. I have learned to be wary of such predictions. A large contract can attract attention, but the real test comes when the factory begins producing, the trucks start arriving and the set crews have to keep pace.
Despite those caveats, however, the project that was recently announced for Joint Base San Antonio, Fort Sam Houston (Fort Sam) deserves attention. The military has selected Salt Lake City, Utah-based Layton Construction, along with Gensler (a San Francisco, Calif. architectural design firm with 58 global locations) to lead the replacement of housing at its Medical Education and Training Campus.
Philadelphia, Pa.-based Volumetric Building Companies (VBC) will manufacture the modules for five dormitory buildings designed to house 6000 military medical trainees. According to Gensler’s announcement, each building will cover approximately 400,000 sq. ft., and plans are for the modules to leave the factory about 95% complete.
VBC CEO Vaughan Buckley says that 1500 modules will be required to build the planned 3000 living units, and that they will be manufactured in its Pennsylvania and California plants. Those are long distances, but he also said that they have developed some innovations to reduce shipping costs; Innovations he will be willing to start talking about in a few months.
The project as a whole represents more than a billion dollars in construction value. (That’s an all-in estimate of the entire project, not just VBC’s work, according to Buckley.) Gensler is calling it the largest multifamily modular project in US history. That’s a striking description, although one should pay even closer attention to the operating plan behind it. A project of this size can demonstrate what happens when the owner, architect, contractor and manufacturer commit to a building system early enough to design around it.
Early Commitment to Modular
One detail in the announcement matters as much as, if not more than, the number of rooms: Gensler says the building components are being standardized and engineered before foundations are poured. That will give VBC and its suppliers a chance to plan production around repeatable units while site work proceeds in parallel. In fact, Buckley says that his team has succeeded in creating a single module design that will work for the entirety of each building (see “A Different Way of Doing Business” in this issue).
Too many modular projects reach a factory after the major design decisions have already been made. The manufacturer is then expected to find savings in a building that was conceived for field construction. Module sizes, mechanical layouts, corridors, structural connections and transportation requirements must be worked around after the fact. At that stage, the factory may still be able to build the project, but much of the opportunity for efficient production has already been lost. Not so for this project.
Additionally, dormitory rooms are particularly suited to repetition. Once the design and quality requirements are settled, the same manufacturing process can be used for many units. Repetition should help crews to improve their work, suppliers to plan deliveries and inspectors to catch problems before they are reproduced throughout the project.
Gensler says modules could be installed at a rate of up to 20 bedrooms per crane per day. That’s a planned installation capability, not a result the team has yet achieved. Maintaining that pace will require completed foundations, trucks arriving in the right sequence, dependable crane access, available set crews and modules that need little corrective work once they reach Texas.
Testing the Whole System
Work is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2026, with a targeted completion date of 24 months after that. According to Gensler’s announcement, this would represent a construction timeline approximately 70% shorter than for conventional construction as well as a 20% reduction in overall project cost. Again, those figures are projections; we will need to see the finished buildings, final schedule and actual costs before treating them as proven savings.
Even so, the government’s willingness to organize a program of this scale around offsite manufacturing is significant. This is housing for people training to become combat medics, respiratory therapists, pharmacy technicians, dental assistants and other health professionals. The customer needs thousands of rooms, consistent quality and a reliable completion date. That kind of demand gives a manufacturer something many modular factories spend years trying to secure: a substantial, defined production program.
It also brings substantial pressure. VBC must coordinate manufacturing across its operation and with its component suppliers. Buckley has said the work will require additional production lines and second shifts, each of which introduces its own management challenges. Adding capacity is easier to announce than balancing that capacity with trained employees, material flow, quality control and a changing construction schedule.
Then there is the staging yard. If the factory produces modules faster than the site can receive them, finished inventory will accumulate. If the factory falls behind, cranes and site crews may be stuck waiting. This program will test whether design, purchasing, production, transportation and installation can function as components of one schedule rather than as a series of separate accomplishments.
Just the Beginning
Buckley’s excitement is understandable. VBC has spent years building its capabilities, and being named the manufacturing partner on a program this large is an achievement. It is also encouraging to see Layton and Gensler place the factory at the center of the delivery plan instead of treating modular construction as a late substitution.
However, it would be premature to declare victory for the entire industry. The selection builds confidence in the team and the approach. Delivery will tell us whether the approach works at this scale. The questions worth considering are practical ones: How quickly can production reach a steady pace? How many modules will require rework? Will component suppliers keep up? How long will completed units wait before shipment? And will the promised schedule and cost advantages survive contact with the jobsite?
Those answers will be more useful to factory owners and general managers than any record-setting headline. If the project succeeds, it could give other large institutional owners a detailed example of how to procure and deliver large housing projects using modular construction. If it encounters difficulties, the industry will need to study those difficulties just as carefully.
I have seen enough modular announcements to know that the largest project isn’t automatically the most instructive. What makes the Fort Sam program worth watching is the decision to bring manufacturing into the project early and to organize a large, repeatable housing need around it.
VBC has been given an extraordinary opportunity and an extraordinary responsibility. Thousands of future military medical professionals need dependable housing. The industry needs to show that factory production can deliver quality at scale while the contractor and site team keep pace.
The announcement has earned our attention. The way these five buildings move from drawings to factory floors to completed dormitories will earn our judgment.
Gary Fleisher is Editor-in-Chief of Offsite Builder.
All images courtesy Volumetric Building Companies.
