At a drafting table in Seattle, Arlan Collins spent the first half of his career doing what architects are trained to do: resolve an unruly world into lines. A wall meets a floor. A corridor finds daylight. A regulation becomes a dimension. Then the Great Recession arrived and made the drawing itself feel insufficient. The problem was no longer only what to build. It was how building happened at all.
Collins had already accumulated two decades of professional scar tissue. He and Mark Woerman met at the University of Idaho, then founded CollinsWoerman in 1988. They grew a Seattle practice around architecture, planning, and the difficult diplomacy of large projects. By the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, the partners understood the customary choreography of construction: architects design, engineers calculate, contractors coordinate, trades arrive in sequence, and every participant protects a narrow piece of the job.
The recession exposed how fragile that choreography could be. Work could disappear. Prices had climbed. Housing still needed to be built, but the process carried too much time, waste, and friction. Collins and Woerman responded by opening a second company, Sustainable Living Innovations, or SLI. Their premise was less like an architectural flourish than an industrial dare: take the repeatable work off the site, integrate it in panels, and assemble the building with the discipline of a manufactured product.
A clean sheet meets a crowded industry
SLI's panels are pieces of space rather than finished rooms. Walls and floors can arrive with plumbing, wiring, mechanical equipment, fire-safety infrastructure, and finishes already organized inside them. A steel structure receives those components in a planned sequence. The distinction gives designers more freedom to respond to an urban site than a stack of shipping-sized boxes would allow.
On paper, the case looked almost impolite in its neatness. A factory offers controlled conditions. Repetition can reduce rework. Integrated parts shrink the number of surprises passed from one discipline to another. High-performance electrical, water, and energy systems can be designed into the product instead of added as expensive garnish near the end.
The market heard all this and supplied the awkward silence that waits after an overconfident toast. “No one was willing to buy it,” Collins later recalled. The obstacle was not comprehension. It was career risk. A developer could choose the familiar process and suffer familiar delays without appearing reckless. An unfamiliar system concentrated attention on the person who approved it.
This is where the story stops being a fable about invention and becomes a useful account of adoption. New technology enters an old industry through contracts, insurance, permitting, finance, suppliers, schedules, and reputations. A clever component must pass through all of them. The product does not merely need to work. It needs to distribute risk in a way that lets other people say yes.
When nobody buys the proof, build the proof
SLI answered reluctance by becoming its own first customer. The company developed 47+7, a 24-unit apartment building in Seattle's University District. Completed in 2015, it gave skeptics something more persuasive than a presentation: an address. People could walk through an apartment, inspect the finishes, and see that a structure assembled from components did not have to announce the fact in every room.
Collins expected the dam to break. It did not. SLI partnered with established construction players, reduced the perceived risk, and still watched the industry hesitate. He described the years with the rueful geometry of a patient founder: success seemed to be around the corner, and for a decade each corner revealed another one.
Collins and Mark Woerman found CollinsWoerman in Seattle.
They launch SLI as the recession forces a rethink of cost and process.
The first patents for the integrated building system are filed.
47+7 turns the system from a proposition into a real apartment building.
Burbridge Place opens, and 3zero3 moves from construction toward occupancy.
Persistence is often edited into a straight road after the destination appears. Collins's version is more interesting because he admits the miscalculation. He thought the technical solution would create its own demand. The years that followed required SLI to take on more of the delivery problem - development, manufacturing, project coordination, capital, and the exhausting work of making novelty feel ordinary.
His way of remaining steady sounds almost pointedly non-industrial. He meditates. He fly-fishes. He has reached for books by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. These are not productivity tricks. They are reminders that a long project needs a life spacious enough to contain disappointment.
Why begin at the top?
SLI did not start with the backyard cottage. Collins chose multifamily and high-rise work because complexity changes with height. Fire codes, structure, mechanical systems, and safety requirements become stricter as a building rises. Solve the demanding version first, he reasoned, and the technology can walk down toward simpler forms. Begin with a small house and each additional level may require a new system.
The decision also concentrated repetition. Apartments repeat kitchens, bathrooms, service runs, walls, and floors. A tower can turn one coordinated detail into hundreds of uses. In manufacturing, repetition is leverage. In conventional construction, it is often an opportunity to repeat the same argument with a different subcontractor.
The resulting building, first known as 303 Battery and now branded 3zero3, puts the thesis on a downtown corner. It is all-electric. Solar photovoltaic panels, battery storage, greywater treatment, waste-heat recovery, and low-voltage systems sit inside the larger construction experiment. White steel braces remain visible on the exterior, as if the tower has chosen to show its working.
In May 2024, Collins walked federal housing officials through the project during a national Road to Innovation tour. The scene carried a quiet reversal. A system that struggled to find a first buyer had become a place government officials visited to study industrialized, energy-efficient housing.
A building system with a social contract
Collins talks about business in unusually reciprocal terms. He and Woerman learned across recessions that caring for customers and colleagues created reserves of goodwill they could not hold on a balance sheet. When their firms needed help, other people helped. His conclusion is plain: helping others is one way to make sure you remain.
That outlook grew inside an architecture career built as much around negotiation as form. Collins has represented Northwest clients through environmental reviews, rezones, variances, public hearings, and building-code discussions. He holds architectural registrations across eight states and British Columbia. The biography matters because industrialized construction does not escape regulation; it encounters regulations in new combinations. An inventor who understands only the panel can be surprised by the city. Collins arrived knowing that a building is also a long civic conversation.
That instinct appears in the kinds of projects SLI has pursued. Burbridge Place, opened at the end of 2023, provides 124 permanent-supportive-housing studios in Seattle. Its five-story form uses load-bearing panels adapted from the same platform. The system's argument is not that every building should look identical. It is that a repeatable process can serve very different residents, sites, and budgets.
He has also connected manufacturing to place. SLI's stated model is to assemble panels in the regions where its buildings rise, using relatively simple equipment and training local workers. Collins has spoken about hiring people who often meet barriers to employment, including veterans and people returning from incarceration or homelessness. The factory, in this telling, is not a distant machine that removes a community from construction. It is another local room in which the building gets made.
The handoff between specialists is often where cost and confusion collect.
Physical products improve when defects become named design problems, not folklore.
A place someone can enter answers questions that a polished pitch cannot.
Permits, finance, contracts, and delivery are part of the product buyers experience.
There is no frictionless ending to a story about changing construction. Buildings consume capital before they produce rent. Factories require volume. Projects encounter markets, permits, weather, and hundreds of human decisions. SLI's approximately $53 million equity round in 2022 reflected both the scale of the ambition and the appetite of physical systems for cash.
But Collins can point to finished evidence: 47+7, Burbridge Place, and 3zero3. Together they trace the evolution from a component idea to market-rate apartments, supportive housing, and a high-rise demonstration. The transferable lesson is not a guarantee that persistence wins. It is that an unfamiliar idea must be translated into the language of every institution that touches it.
Architects are used to imagining a finished building before anyone else can see it. Collins extended that habit to the process around the building - the factory, the sequence, the financing, and the buyer's fear. He began with lines on a clean sheet. He ended up drawing the path by which an entire industry might take one careful step sideways.