Inside a warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard steel beams and flat metal sheeting rest atop a workbench. A diagram—which looks an awful lot like Ikea furniture assembly instructions—spells out where each beam and metal screw belongs. On it someone has carefully checked off each component, one by one.
The metal may not look like much yet, but it’s on its way to becoming part of the world’s tallest modular residential high-rise. Workers will configure these beams into walls, which will become the scaffolding of rooms, which link together to form entire apartments. Then the ‘mods’ are loaded onto a truck and driven 2.5 miles away, lifted by crane and snapped into position like Lincoln Logs at the Atlantic Yards complex being built next to the Barclays Center (home to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets). Time to load an apartment: 30 minutes. From the first cut of metal to placing a mod next to the arena, the entire process takes about 20 days. “And we’ll get faster,” says Susan Jenkins, vice president of Skanska, one of the companies behind the mods. “This is bringing the best of manufacturing and construction together.”
The first 32-storey tower, dubbed B2, which will include street-level storefronts as well as 363 rental apartments, is slated for completion in December. Build-out of the $4.9 billion project—6 million square feet of residential (6,430 apartments, 2,250 of them designated affordable) plus nearly 600,000 square feet of office and retail spread over 22 acres in the heart of Brooklyn—is scheduled to last 20 years.
(This story appears in the 16 May, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)