Prefab construction dates back to 1624, when a disassembled house was shipped from England to Cape Ann, Massachusetts, to house a fishing fleet that used reliable, ready-to-use English construction techniques familiar to colonists who had just arrived in the United States in 1620. The idea of building modular buildings with prefabricated materials and parts has existed for thousands of years. Roman armies built their forts in prefabricated sections to facilitate their installation once they arrived at their destination, and since then modular construction has only grown. While prefabricated housing has had a long and prosperous history, modular architecture is much more of a phenomenon recent.
When modular construction and planning began, prefabrication had existed for centuries. Modular construction has a long history in Germany, dating back to the 19th century. That's when the first prefabricated buildings were built. However, it was not until the period after the Second World War that modular construction began to have widespread use in the country.
The benefits that modular construction provided to homes since the Sears Modern Home program were the type of benefits that were even more important to businesses, specifically, the reduction in construction time. These new modular houses were built from pieces from a factory, where a steel structure was used as the chassis on which the house was transported to the construction site. Modular construction and prefab construction are different, but they often overlap; there are usually prefabricated parts of the modular scheme, for example. After the war, when soldiers began to return to their homes, the United States experienced a severe housing shortage and, once again, turned to prefab homes for reasons of efficiency, cost reduction and speed of construction.
As the UK currently faces a significant housing shortage and the need for more sustainable building practices, modular construction is likely to play an increasingly important role in this country's construction industry in the years to come. Nowadays, modular construction is a widely recognized construction method and is used to build a wide range of structures, including residential housing, hotels, hospitals, and schools. In England, many McDonald's restaurants are fully built and operational in four weeks, thanks to modular construction. Contrary to popular belief that modular construction is a modern feat, the techniques used to build a modular building have existed for thousands of years. The construction of modular buildings may seem like a newer way of constructing buildings, but it actually has a long and historic history.
With the growing demand for sustainable and affordable construction, modular construction is likely to continue to play an important role in the construction industry for decades to come. In the early 2000s, some companies began experimenting with modular construction in Spain, mainly for the construction of prefabricated and affordable housing. In the 1970s, modular construction gained enough ground among companies that began to choose it more frequently instead of traditional construction. As companies began to realize the benefits of prefab construction, it became widespread among the construction community.
