industrialized-construction
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BASE4 - Architects, Engineers, Designers
A Boca Raton firm decided architecture should behave more like a factory than an atelier - so it wired together designers on four continents into a 24-hour workday and pointed the whole thing at one goal: build faster and cheaper.
Vikas Murali
Vikas Murali is the co-founder and CEO of Offsight, a San Francisco software company that gives prefab, modular and offsite construction factories real-time visibility into production, quality, materials and labor. A University of Pennsylvania systems engineer who cut his teeth shipping enterprise software at Texas Instruments and Barclays, Murali spent years as a consultant watching engineered-to-order manufacturers run multimillion-dollar projects on brittle spreadsheets. In 2020 he and co-founder Andrew Xue built Offsight to replace those spreadsheets with mobile-first tracking, betting that the factories building the future of housing need to prove they actually deliver on speed, cost and quality.
BLOX
BLOX is a Bessemer, Alabama company that builds hospitals the way Detroit builds cars. Using its own Design Manufacture Construct (DMC) method, BLOX engineers and fabricates complete medical modules - patient rooms, exam rooms, trauma centers, headwalls and bathrooms - inside a million-square-foot former railcar factory, then ships them across the country to be assembled on site. Founded in 2010 out of architecture firm GA Studio, BLOX has grown to roughly 600 employees and bills itself as the largest manufacturer of modular healthcare buildings in the United States.
Chris Giattina
Chris Giattina is the founder and CEO of BLOX, a Bessemer, Alabama company that builds hospitals the way Detroit builds cars. A University of Pennsylvania-trained architect who runs the family firm Giattina Aycock (GA Studio), he turned a former Pullman railcar plant into a million-square-foot factory where acute-care medical facilities are designed, manufactured, and assembled using his Design-Manufacture-Construct (DMC) method. His pitch is a clean equation: buildings at twice the quality, twice the speed, and twice the value - what he calls 2x2x2.