BOSTON–Tech-powered global design company, Bryden Wood, is strengthening its presence in the US by opening a new headquarters in Boston, MA, in the coming weeks.
Bryden Wood board director Jaimie Johnston MBE, together with Phil Langley, board director and head of Bryden Wood’s creative technologies division, will lead the company’s US expansion.
Equinix, Amazon Web Services, Boldt, Chandos, and DPR Construction are already working with Bryden Wood on industrialized construction projects. The company’s new US HQ will allow more US clients to benefit from this market-leading approach.
“This move puts us at the center of an industry that embraces change – with large, tech-led clients working in innovative ways and moving quickly,” says Jaimie Johnston. “Being a US-registered company, with global teams, will enable us to take a leadership position for our US clients.”
Industrialized construction
Bryden Wood’s vision for industrialized construction brings together a platforms approach to design and construction, driven by digital configurators, and delivered using new commercial models such as Integrated Project Delivery.
Platforms are kits of parts composed of manufactured components. The approach offers standardization at component level and design freedom at asset level. With platforms, manufactured, tech-rich components are assembled highly efficiently and accurately on a site with fewer operatives, working in better conditions, more safely. Platforms offer more certainty that projects will deliver on time and on budget; with reduced carbon and re-use embedded in a project at the earliest stages of design.
Bryden Wood works with large, tech-led US clients to develop automated design technologies, such as digital configurators, that help global companies decide how, when, and where they develop their construction pipelines in a fraction of the time it would take to assess viability traditionally. Design configurators use genetic algorithms to generate thousands of design and engineering solutions for sites around the world.
The company’s approach to data center design and delivery has already delivered benefits to data centers across Europe, with significant increases in IT yield, productivity and speed to market, and reductions in carbon, energy consumption and waste.
“We’re consistently being asked the same questions by our US clients and general contractors – can you develop a kit of parts approach, and drive it using configurators? How will this approach reduce the time and costs to deliver my assets?” continues Johnston. “Clients are seeking the same benefits of continual improvement that have allowed other industries to flourish. By developing solutions
that allow appropriate levels of repeatability, without sacrificing design quality, we’re helping them transform their businesses.”
Forward-looking clients
Bryden Wood is working with: The Boldt Company, a leading contractor and lean construction expert, on a major manufacturing facility in the US; major Canadian constructor Chandos; and supply chain innovator and digital platform creator, KatalystDI.
Bryden Wood is also partnering with TerraPraxis and MIT on ‘repowering coal’; a major initiative to cut global carbon emissions by repowering coal-fired power plants with small modular reactors. This is a project with a critically urgent timeline, made feasible by Bryden Wood’s expertise in automated design and standardized construction.
Using standardized sets of manufactured components will create a new, open marketplace and new supply chain possibilities. These are already being explored by forward-thinking consultants in the US who are linking their clients directly to the supply chain to map out the industrialized construction process.
Scalability is where platforms and configurators really demonstrate their benefits. The data center, healthcare, energy, and pharma sectors are all industries with huge potential to improve design and delivery through industrialized construction.
Dissatisfaction with the status quo coupled with the right commercial models, a hunger for innovation, and the desire for scalability, mean the US construction sector is ripe for major change.
Phil Langley says: “Clients want more control in the way they make key decisions about their future assets. They want to get to market faster, be more productive, and achieve their climate goals. This means developing new, ownable, creative technologies to enable automated design. We develop algorithmic design software for the global data center and transport sectors that simply isn’t being developed anywhere else.”
