A two-bedroom showhome designed for the Augusta Township project by B+H Architects and CABN.Beattie Film
On a 44-acre property northeast of Brockville, Ont., CABN, a net-zero builder known for its energy-efficient cottages, is aiming to develop a rural community that fuses ecological design with a high-tech construction approach that relies on factory-made prefabricated components.
The 67-unit Augusta Township project, situated within Ottawa’s commuter-shed, features clusters of duplexes and five-plexes fitted out with renewable energy technology, stormwater recycling and internal pedestrian-only connections. Two-thirds of the site will remain undeveloped, with trails and woodlands accessible to residents.
The design thinking, explains B&H Architects Jamie Miller, a senior associate and director of global biomimicry, was to draw inspiration from natural systems, like ant colonies, trees and the site’s topography, to create a “regenerative” community. “We’re trying to put designs in places that contribute to the landscape and the ecological services of the site,” he says. “Instead of creating a centralized grid that feeds all houses, I want all the houses to feed the grid.”
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Off-stage, at CABN’s new factory in Brockville, the company will build and preassemble significant elements of the planned units, using modular techniques meant to improve quality and efficiency. A local builder will do the on-site assembly.
The 93,000 square-foot plant, which will be able to produce up to 300 four-bedroom homes per year, manufactures “flat packs” not unlike IKEA furniture kits – mass timber-framed wall-assemblies with built-in windows, insulation and cladding. “Those kits are shipped to site and then assembled in a matter of days,” says CEO Jackson Wyatt, who founded CABN four years. “Our thesis is to use technology to make sustainable housing more attainable to everyone, regardless of geographic or economic situation.”
Aerial concept rendering of the Augusta Township project, a 44-acre property north-east of Brockville. The 67-unit project features clusters of duplexes and five-plexes fitted out with renewable energy technology, storm water recycling and internal pedestrian-only connections.B+H Architects
CABN is among a growing number of firms crowding into the modular construction space in response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pledge to invest $26-billion to boost productivity in the home-building sector to improve affordability. The goal is to strip the inefficiencies out of conventional home-building using approaches borrowed from innovation-driven Swedish firms that revolutionized modular building using robotics and digital design.
Among the latest developments: Mattamy Homes founder Peter Gilgan in June unveiled plans for a prefab housing firm, Stelumar Advanced Manufacturing, that will have capacity to construct 3,000 homes per year.
And last winter, Assembly Corp., a prefab design and construction firm, revealed it was acquiring all the equipment in a Swedish modular construction factory fitted out with high-tech robotics designed by Lindbäcks, a century-old pioneer in this sector.
“The machines are sitting in 34 shipping containers in a port in northern Sweden, ready to be shipped as soon as our factory is ready to go,” says Assembly CEO Geoff Cape. “Lindbäcks will work with us over an 18-month period to operationalize and optimize that system.”
Mr. Cape, a former Evergreen CEO who knows his way around Parliament Hill, is using that interregnum to preassemble a consortium of modular players to push the Carney Liberals to ensure that the $26-billion promise delivers the desired results. The Canadian Industrialized Construction Coalition’s 50 members include builders like Mattamy and Windmill, but also firms that specialize in engineering, robotics and AI.
Interior view of a two-bedroom home at CABN's Augusta Township.Beattie Film
The members are debating policy asks, from tax incentives to the deployment of federal infrastructure financing, and aim to present a fleshed-out agenda to Ottawa later this year. “It’s like we want to help them help us help Canada with the housing agenda,” says Mr. Cape. “We’ve got a really wide-open door in Ottawa welcoming us in to help them design that policy.”
For all the political tailwinds, the promise of modular has long proven elusive. “I like to say that modular has been the next big thing for the last 50 years,” says New York architect David Wallance, who designed modular projects in Manhattan and wrote a 2021 book entitled, The Future of Modular Architecture. “That’s still a way of capturing the current moment. Startups come, startups go. So far, no one has really cracked the code.”
Mr. Vallance’s study includes a list of earlier attempts, from DIY homes made from precut timber and sold by Sears to futuristic approaches that surfaced in the 1950s, such as TechBuilt houses, or, more recently, dwellings made from shipping containers.
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Some promote “volumetric” design – i.e., building entire rooms in a factory, then trucking them to a job site to be winched into place – while others argue for IKEA-inspired kits that are erected and joined on location. Mr. Wallance argues the key lies in logistics, and finding optimal ways to ship modular units efficiently.
The latest advances marry not just robotics, supply chain management and precision engineering, but also layer in all the design, building code evaluations and costing that can be digitized and automated on a single software platform. “There’s a lot on the software side that has changed,” says Stelumar general manager Peter Hass, explaining that “machine readable” architectural drawings can automatically place orders for materials that will be shipped to the factory for assembly. “You can change the fundamental economics of the business.”
The Augusta Township project's built form is carefully arranged to foster a sense of community.B+H Architects
All these firms, however, face the same basic question: will anyone buy what they’re selling? Ellis Don, which invested heavily in a modular factory near Hamilton, learned the hard way that the field-of-dreams strategy doesn’t always work as intended.
CABN, Mr. Wyatt says, solved the problem by constructing its own factory. Stelumar, notes Mr. Hass, plans to sell its products – prefabricated wall units and floor panels for houses, missing-middle projects and mid-rises – to Mattamy, but other builders as well.
Mr. Cape acknowledges the uncertainty of not using a vertically integrated model. Assembly is building a large factory at Downsview that, he hopes, will supply prefabricated components to the thousands of new housing units planned for the decommissioned airport.
But has Assembly signed any formal offtake agreements with Downsview’s developers? “That would be amazing,” Mr. Cape says. Most builders, he adds, don’t work that way, yet. “The federal government is talking about doing that, so the new policy plans coming out of Ottawa might include some sort of a long-term buy plan to help capitalize these factories or give them bankable certainty.”