(dynamic music)
- This is a Lego.
No, this is a Lego.
But this is like a giant steel modular construction Lego.
Stack them together and in a couple of weeks,
boom, you got a building.
Then, just like a Lego, you can take them apart
whenever you want and reassemble them.
Why do this?
Well, think about the mall.
All of those shopping oases that got built in the '70s,
'80s, and '90s, all that concrete and rebar.
Well, the internet made a bunch of malls obsolete.
(man laughing)
And what do you do with the malls then?
Some unideal conversion, or demolition.
Now extrapolate that to a world with millions of structures
rendered obsolete every year.
Annually, about 2 billion tons of waste
is generated by destroying buildings.
Enter modular construction.
- In the modular world
we think the holy grail is a red six Lego.
You can build anything out of a red six.
So we created what we think is a red six.
- This building has been assembled
and disassembled nine times in seven years.
- Nine times?
- Nine times.
- Let's pause on that.
That means they put the building together.
People used it.
Then they took it apart, loaded it on trucks,
moved it to a different place, and then assembled it again.
Then they did that again eight more times in seven years.
All of this raises the question,
do buildings need to be permanent?
Do cities need to be inert?
This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Just north of San Francisco is a place called Mare Island
where they used to make...
- Submarines for the US Navy.
- We went out to this island
to visit the folks at iMod,
one of the companies working to make
modular construction mainstream.
This is Reed.
He's a general contractor by trade.
So he spent most of his career making custom buildings.
Now he's all in on modular.
This frame is his baby.
Well, not his actual baby. Reed has human children.
- We make one frame, that's it.
There's not two or three
different versions of our iMod frame.
There's only one.
You could have frames that stack side to side,
end to end, top to bottom.
And from that we can build multiple,
multiple different projects.
- That's a big deal.
'Cause the modular
and prefab movement has been underwhelming.
- Few are prepared to commit themselves
to such a newfangled idea as the prefab.
- Historically the emphasis
has been on custom structures.
- We're not gonna build a round one.
We're not gonna build a square one.
It's this shape.
And you stick with that
because you can't be everything to everybody.
- What makes this frame so special?
Well, it's all pretty hidden.
(dynamic music)
- Our roof system has in-built gutters,
which allow obviously the water to shed
away from the building.
- That's Mike.
He used to oversee an assembly line
for Rolls Royce airplane engines.
That's pretty cool.
- Our frames are manufactured in Mexico or China.
Then they come in as a bare frame
and we start putting in the air conditioner system,
air conditioning ducting,
putting in the wall system, the window system,
and then the HVA system.
- All that HVA system sits in one module.
The equipment's in there, the duct work's in there,
the return air is in there.
That all allows for us to be faster
and quicker on the job site
when we get out to install our buildings.
- And that frame has connections all over it.
So you can transport them on a truck, or ship.
Offload them with a simple crane at the construction site.
Stick a few of 'em together, add in the walls.
Hook in the plumbing and the electrical.
Bam, you're done.
iMod is focused on building classrooms right now.
'Cause apparently children need to learn somewhere
that's not a Zoom conference.
When we went out to see them
put the final touches on this school
we never would have guessed that it was modular prefab.
(dynamic music)
- Typically it would take nine to 15 months
to manufacture a classroom out in the field.
We're doing that in 12 days.
- Yes, you heard that right.
An entire classroom in 12 days from these simple frames.
But wait a minute, I know what you're thinking.
Didn't a company in China just build
a 57 story prefab skyscraper in like 19 days?
They sure did, and that's super cool.
But a lot of those buildings are sitting empty.
Then what?
What I think is cool about this approach
to modular construction is the ease with which
they can disassemble and move these frames around.
- Ok we're just gonna walk.
So follow me.
Our six new classrooms are on the left side.
- And that flexibility
was the idea from the start.
You see, a decade ago, iMod's co-founder Craig
spoke with an official from the Los Angeles school district
who said... - "It's crazy.
We have all these classrooms that we built
deployed over here.
And because of demographic changes in the last 20 years,
we don't need them there anymore.
We need them here.
But we can't relocate them.
Your building is relocatable.
That would be a tremendous asset to us."
- In 20 years from now, guess what?
They don't need classrooms anymore,
but they need medical office buildings.
These can turn into medical office buildings
just by swapping out components,
and not having to go through a whole construction phase.
We don't want our buildings to ever
end up in a landfill, ever.
We wanna take that system
and use it again, and again, and again, and again.
- So what does a city look like
when a bunch of its buildings can move?
Picture this scenario.
A giant company comes in,
needs lots of places to put people.
Lots of iMod frames come in.
An office park emerges.
In a few months, a neighborhood grows around it.
But a decade later that giant company leaves,
and the people move to different parts of the city,
or different cities altogether.
Those offices and that neighborhood can scale down
without leaving urban blight and unused space.
But what if we think about
this modularity on a global level?
(dynamic music)
- We developed this system in conjunction with Maersk,
the big shipping company.
Every one of our frames is shaped exactly like a container.
And that way they can go onto a ship
and transport just like a container on a ship.
They can go on a train
and transport just like a container does on a train.
Pretty much every country in the world,
and every city in the world, can handle a container.
They know how to do it.
- What if, as the needs
of countries change, entire buildings,
even entire cities, could be dispersed elsewhere?
This would be a hard reset
for how we think about the built environment.
We would have to shift our mentality
around the notion of constant growth.
We see cities like Detroit that went from 2 million people
in the '50s, to just under a million people now,
and people think of them as a failure.
But why?
Cities are inherently dynamic
and maybe they should be able to change in size.
Today, those size changes haven't been a good look
because of the hollowed out warehouses
and homes that are left behind.
But what if we could shift those structures
to other parts of the city, or other parts of the world?
(gentle music)
We might lose the character that comes
from old structures evolving over time,
but not every building needs to be charming.
Some things are more about utility.
Some things work better as Legos.
Come back next time for another episode of Hard Reset.
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