Platform II was designed to use basic materials with the minimum amount of fabrication where possible.

There may be parallels with what happened with BIM.The UK was the first to mandate Building Information Modelling and our standards became quite widely adopted, or were at least used as a starting point, globally.

It will be interesting to see if construction Platform design has a similar global appeal, once people have understood the limitations of modular.. COVID-19: accelerating the shift to construction Platforms?.COVID-19 has simply accelerated this journey, or accentuated the need to move forwards at speed.As a result, the UK government is now looking to double down on the current plan to develop construction Platforms and to make things happen even more quickly.

This should send a strong message to the construction industry.This shift is coming.

We've already seen other sectors - entertainment, retail, music - being disrupted over the last 25 years.

Rather than resisting the process, the big players of the construction industry need to acknowledge the reality of where we’re heading.We first met Illumina because they were building their new UK HQ – a very large laboratory building – on Quanta Park, where we were already active.

We were called in to assist with the mechanical and electrical engineering aspect of the project where additional technical input was required, to sit with the client and tie the various elements together, assess why it was going wrong, and help secure its completion and commissioning.. Illumina specialise in DNA sequencing.DNA analysis is a complex and data-intensive business.

Every sequence generates six terabytes of data, and Illumina’s HQ houses about 80 sequencers, running around the clock, generating significant amounts of heat.So, a key issue is to ensure there are aqequate cooling systems.