Walk the Line: Richard Hyams from astudio

We caught up with Richard Hyams, Founding Director of astudio, to talk about the flexibility of standardisation and the importance of collaboration for scaling.

Richard Hyams

Founding Director
astudio

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Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at astudio?

“I'm Richard Hyams. I lead astudio and have done for 15 years.

astudio is primarily in architectural practice, but we have also begun moving into offsite. My career started at Foster and Partners, working on large-scale projects like London City Hall, Moore London and Tower Place, where I learned my trade; how to design great buildings, how to present great buildings and how to detail and build them. My skillset is more in the methods of construction and materials. That was always where I was focused at Fosters: I was always talking to factories and to façade manufacturers, trying to understand the processes they use to build. That foundation of knowledge is very much embedded in how we design and deliver at astudio.

Is offsite a significant part of what you do at astudio?  

It is becoming more significant. We started our offsite journey back when I used to go to the manufacturers in Italy, Permasteelisa, who were building façades for us offsite. It was a valued component of the building factory conditions, tested performance-wise and detail-wise. Working with the people who are actually going to build it when you’re designing it – that's very much the philosophy of offsite. So, having developed as a practice in that way, with that methodology in mind, has just become more important in the work we do.

“We’re also trying to get more of our buildings built that way, because the quality and speed is better.”

You can also have much more detailed dialogue earlier on in the design process, which ultimately means your buildings are better quality when they're built. At present, I would say that around 60% of our projects involve a degree of offsite. As a result, we've set up another business, amodular, to predominantly be a deliverer of offsite buildings.

What we realised fairly early on as architects, was that there was a level of knowledge missing in the industry, about how to work well with offsite design. The reason I love offsite, is because we start first with how we're going to build it, then you design the buildings, knowing the technologies you're going to use. That informs the design and therefore what you get planning permission for is much closer, if not identical to what you're ultimately going to build. It makes the whole design process much more transparent, much more deliverable and much more enjoyable.

Illustration from astudio.co.uk

Do you often find that clients are coming to you asking for an offsite approach? Or are they coming to you wanting higher quality and you suggest offsite as a preferred method? 

It's a mix of both. We have a lot of projects coming through the door where people are more interested in looking at offsite, and because we've got a reputation in the industry, we are looking at projects for them. What is challenging now, is that we're in this transition period where people don't quite understand the implications or the process in delivering using offsite methods. We have a lot of clients saying, “I have planning permission for this building. Can I build it using offsite technologies?” Unfortunately, my answer is “Brilliant! We're happy to help you, but it's a bit late. We'll need to alter the design to enable it to be built in an optimised manner.” Otherwise what you get is the worst of both worlds. Ultimately, in that situation, we’ll need to go back to planning a building that utilises offsite technologies to the best of their ability.

Designing something and making changes at that early stage, is well known and easy from a developer point of view, that is a known technology. The industry is set up to deliver it that way. Procurement rules are all set up to deliver it that way.

What we're actually doing is disrupting all of those methods that are known, trusted and understood, with new ones that need to work in a completely different way in order to get the best out of it.

Imagine you start building a factory that is going to build thousands and thousands of iPhones. Then someone comes along and says, “I'd like one, but I want it to look more like this” and you have to push an odd one through the process. Imagine the disruption to the efficiency, the price and the technologies, right down to the way you order a glass screen for the iPhone. It's got to be a system design method of thinking, from the outset. Otherwise, you're not optimising it. Now of course, the difference with offsite is you get client number two walk in with a slightly different brief and a slightly different specification. What we have to do as designers, is match a process of working to enable that flexibility of design.

What approach do you take for offering bespoke offsite buildings? Do you have a kit of parts?

This is a journey we've been on for the last seven years before getting to where we are now, which I think is a really exciting place to be! We first started leaning on the offsite industry in order to find the best fit manufacturer for the design that we needed building. In tender terms, that meant we were going to one supplier to say, “this building is yours to deliver.” Of course, that means you don't necessarily get a competitive price. It also means that the supplier has control over where that design goes, because it's their system and they're building it in their factory. I thought long and hard about that as a challenge.

amodular portfolio, astudio.co.uk

The industry is set up almost like a series of siloed different manufacturers, whereas what it needs to be in my view, is a number of manufacturers that can all work together. Say that you've got clients that want 5,000 homes over the next three years, but they don't necessarily want to give one business more than a third of their turnover in capacity. Therefore, they can't meet the 5,000 homes a year. This creates a real problem that prevents the upscaling of the quantity being built.

We knew we needed to come up with a kit of parts that enabled us to join all these manufacturers together and that's what we've done. We've designed a frame system for our residential builds and it's transferable into education, health and justice models. This enables us to supply that frame to all the manufacturers that buy their steel frames in from elsewhere – they can instead buy ours! That meant I could join manufacturer A to B, to C, to build up the capacity.

“But, as an architect, I don’t want to make millions of the same – I still want flexibility.”

We've designed a series of tools that enable us to parametrically alter those frame sizes. It can give me as a designer, the ability to continually change the design, to meet all the different clients’ requirements in different site constraints, while still delivering a standardised system kit of parts for amodular. This is where technology plays its part – I'm a great believer that technology is able to overcome a lot of those unique bespoke problems by standardising processes.

Portfolio of projects, astudio.co.uk

Could you talk us through a recent project?

Our first project was for Be First in Barking and Dagenham. I explained to them that we weren’t developers but instead we had a vision for designing offsite homes for affordable housing. The model that we offered, and are still offering and honing each time we do a different iteration of it, was to say, “we don't want to buy land, we want to build the right sort of homes where the need is, on land kept by councils.” Our offer to Barking was that we would pick out a site that was best suited for building, we would then design, manufacture and install the housing on that site for them and sell it at a price. What we were ultimately trying to do is fix our price. In traditional construction, no one really knows how much you’ll pay for a build until right at the end of the job, which is too late for a lot of the budgets, particularly councils where they've got a specific amount of money to spend. The council is really excited by it; they're now looking at how they can improve their program elsewhere.

What exciting things have you got coming up at astudio?

I always like to be at the forefront of our technology, design and sustainability progress. We have a very strong environmental and social governance at astudio, so we know exactly where we're trying to go. We describe the work we do as nature meeting technology – you get the best of both.

One R&D project we've got going on at moment is the automation of the design of our steel frame. What we want to do is align manufacturing to where we are as designers. At the moment, there is a gap, and the gap is filled with translators from manufacturers taking an architectural design and turning it into something that is as near as possible to something that will work in the factory. This involves a lot of waste. We've nearly completed that exercise. So, we can have a building design, we can create the frame in a matter of days, we can go straight into manufacturing in a matter of hours, and that completely revolutionises how we design. That's what we are most excited about at the moment – a kind of, “what if?” What does that mean for us as architects? What does that mean for us at amodular, and the offsite and manufacturing world?

It has become a process. What the design piece does, and this is the misunderstanding that a lot of architects have about offsite, is it gives us more design flexibility. It gives us an amazing amount of fun in projects where we can actually say, “you know what? We can not only design it faster, but we can also secure the price earlier, and we can get into manufacturing sooner.”

The last piece of the jigsaw to solve is the scale. Once you have the scale, then you've got the optimisation of cost. At the moment, there's a marginal cost difference between offsite and traditional construction.

As we move into in the next few years, where skills and labour are becoming more scarce, offsite will have a greater ability to deliver than traditional. We're trying to get in early enough with our clever thinking and tools to help us really get that scale ramped up.

Is there anything I should have asked you about today that I haven't, or anything you wanted to mention?

We're at an interesting point with amodular – we're about to (hopefully) inject a significant amount of funding into it which will accelerate our ability to deliver. We are in a place where we're looking for long-term partners who need thousands of houses each year. That's why we're talking to the large landholders. One of the things I keep saying to everybody that we meet is, “you've almost got to forget everything every few years.”

“With advancing technologies, I’m conscious that you almost need to keep forgetting everything, because if we keep working the way we used to and go forwards looking backwards, we’re never going to innovate. So, we go forwards, looking forwards.”

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And to end, who are you passing the mic to next?

“I’m passing the mic to Andy Smith at VBC (Volumetric Building Companies). Andy’s background is in UK modular, but now he’s working on some fascinating large-scale projects, mostly in the USA.”

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