105 Sumner Street - designed for development by Landsec - will be the first major building completed using our Platform Design for Manufacture and Assembly (P-DfMA) approach from building design to delivery.

P-DfMA is a versatile and customisable construction system for commercial, residential and other building types.

P-DfMA consists of common parts, all made from readily available materials, which have been designed to go together in rehearsed ways. Each part of the platform system has been designed to value based on its performance requirements.

This standard kit of parts can be configured to offer a broad range of building products without limiting design ambition. Design effort can be spent where it adds the most value – creating places where people want to live and work.

105 Sumner Street consists of two new-build commercial office buildings, built around a publicly accessible internal courtyard, in total comprising c. 135,000 sq ft. It will be nine storeys high with reception and basement areas. The development will be a high quality and sustainable building with a vastly improved streetscape and public realm, continuing the transformation of Southwark.

It will use a hybrid steel and concrete structural platform that was developed as part of an Innovate UK First Phase Challenge Fund research project on Automated Construction. The structural platform developed as part of the R&D project will provide the chassis for the office floor space and the project will include the development of cladding and building services components to create a reusable kit-of-parts-based solution for offices.

The project will validate and showcase the benefits that can be delivered using P-DfMA techniques, Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and digital technologies on a large-scale new build commercial office development. It is designed to a ‘zero carbon in use’ strategy, and is already achieving gains:

  • efficiency: a predicted 9.5% reduction in capital cost, 13% reduction in programme, 40% reduction in steel used and 50% reduction in site operatives for superstructure and facade
  • sustainability: a forecast 19.4% reduction in embodied carbon per square metre, a 36.4% carbon reduction in the substructure and 20.2% in the superstructure and façade.

The Platform approach has been adopted by the Government and is the focus of the Construction Innovation Hub.

The scale and ambition of Sumner Street will be a catalyst for change and a major step forward in proving the new business and financial metrics, whole life performance, and supply chain adoption needed – and deliverable – to accelerate the transformation of the construction sector.

To read more about the principles and benefits of P-DfMA, download our e-book here.