Introduction

The design and construction professions are adrift and anachronistic, mired in outmoded practices, despite enormous advances in digital technology. The construction process itself is poised for disruptive innovation. The prevalence at American construction sites of building components manufactured overseas points to the reality of a global construction supply chain, which leads us to the concept of intermodal modular architecture: instead of delivering those components packed inside a shipping container, we can deliver them as an integrated “plug-and-play” system, with the shipping container itself re-purposed as a standardized building module. The book puts forward a theory of modular architecture based on 12 fundamental principles that are threaded through subsequent chapters. The argument is that globalization, the growth of the global middle class, sustainability, and intermodal modular architecture are all interwoven.