Kingspan Group set to launch offsite arm

The Kingspan Group will launch a major offsite construction division at Interbuild 2004, which will provide a holistic solution from foundations to roof.
Kingspan Off-Site will integrate products and systems from across the group's businesses, including insulated roof, wall and faade systems, structural steel frames and products and raised access floors.
In addition, the firm has selected key design and product partners to provide a wide variety of design solutions. These cover external faade and rainscreen systems, foundations, M&E services, daylighting and solar management, external and internal doors, internal wall and ceiling linings, ceiling systems, brise soleil and more than 20 types of faade rainscreen materials, finishes and textures.
Tom Paul, a consultant to Off-Site from parent Kingspan Group, said: "The message here is free-form design with total flexibility and adaptability, but with a lot of predictability in terms of standards and performance. You get a faster speed of construction with very high standards and good life cycle costs backed by a wide range of performance data.
"Our range of specialist partners means we are able to provide innovative internal and external designs. It is important that we produce buildings of real architectural merit."
Kingspan has invested in a 13,000m3 manufacturing facility at its North Yorkshire plant. It claims its automated production line can manufacture a wide range of cold-formed sections, systems and assemblies, which will form the structural elements, frames and platform units. Its trump card is that it can produce bespoke design solutions one after the other on the same production line.
Kingspan is targeting
the education, health and student/keyworker accommodation markets. It has produced 11 fully worked up exemplar designs to illustrate what it can provide in conjunction with HLM Architects, Arup, Cyril Sweett and M&E specialist NG Bailey.
Kingspan Off-Site sales and marketing director Gary Crosby said: "We want to stress that we are not builders. We are component suppliers. We are allying ourselves with four or five construction partners, including Britspace, Caledonian and Pyramid Building Systems."
The Kingspan rationale is to work directly with the client and/or architect and help them produce the right design, be it a full offsite solution or a mix of traditional and offsite. It will then manufacture the elements and deliver them to the contractor, which will act as an assembly house.
Confidence in offsite solutions has been low because of a lack of robust performance data. To combat that, Paul said: "We are getting BRE [Building Research Establishment] accreditation for individual components, building sections and the complete buildings, along with detailed life cycle costs worked out by Cyril Sweett and a construction sustainability model from Arup."
Performance data covers: structural, thermal, air tightness, fire, acoustics, sustainability, durability, buildability, accreditation and life cycle costs.