Architecture school announces first offsite construction course

The UK’s first dedicated post-graduate architecture course covering modern methods of construction (MMC) is being developed by Oxford Brookes.

该大学正在与Hawkins Brown和其他建筑师合作，创建一个教学大纲，使学生具备他们所说的模块化和非现场技能，这些技能在不断变化的市场中需要实践。

Shahab Resalati, director of the Architectural Engineering Research Group at Oxford Brookes, said they were responding to “the inevitable” in a bid to “future-proof” their students.

“We see that the change is coming and we need to have this course,” he said. “It will be the first dedicated architecture course in the UK to include modern methods of construction.”

Planning is still at an early stage but it will probably be a year of a part II diploma course, worth 180 credits and with a curriculum covering both MMC and design for manufacture and assembly (DfMA). It might also run as a standalone MSc, said Resalati. He hopes the course will be ready for the September 2020 intake.

“We need to make sure our architecture students are capable of meeting the requirements of these new technologies coming on board so they are basically future-proofed,” he added.

Architects who criticise MMC are Luddites and missing the point totally

Nigel Ostime, Hawkins Brown

“One in five new homes are offsite-built and that’s a good indication of what’s happening. The government is asking for MMC to be included in architecture syllabuses. We think the genie is already out of the bottle.”

Oxford Brookes一直在与Hawkins Brown的交付总监奈杰尔•奥斯泰姆(Nigel Ostime)合作，后者希望建筑师们能够参与到有关现代建筑方法的对话中，而不是“旁观者的抱怨”。

“We have to improve productivity and only way we will do that is through a fairly fundamental change not a tinker,” he said.

“We can’t do too much on our own. We need a critical mass of practices wanting to promote this way of thinking.”

Hawkins Brown去年加入了行业组织Buildoffsite，帮助将重心从交付转移到设计，因为MMC需要早在RIBA第二阶段就考虑。其他参与的建筑师包括Sheppard Robson, BPTW, PTEa, Stride Treglown和Levitt Bernstein。所有的实践都可以提供建筑师在牛津布鲁克斯课程上授课。

Ostime补充说:“批评MMC的建筑师都是勒德分子，他们完全没有抓住重点。”“因为这种态度，这个行业受到了阻碍。

“We need to be much more progressive. We’re not going to stop the advance of technology but it’s our duty as architects to find ways of making these buildings acceptable aesthetically and functionally. And we need to speak to manufacturers and help them improve the quality of their products.”

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People tend to assume MMC means volumetric stacked boxes but in fact there is a “wealth of options”, he said.

“Frankly there’s a lot of crap out there. If you look at volume providers’ websites it’s quite distressing. But it doesn’t have to be like that.”

Metropolitan Workshop’s RIBA National Award-winningMapleton Crescentflats in Wandsworth for Pocket was an example of a “gorgeous” volumetric building, he added.