I'm perpetually confused on that front - interior, especially drywall, is stupid labor and time intensive (have to wait for taped joints to dry). There should be huge econmomies of scale for prefab walls with electric and ducting built in, yet all we see is this sort of 3d printing stuff.
Where do you store hundreds of running feet of prefabricated wall during construction delays?
How do you move sections of prefabricated wall into and within a dryed-in building?
How do you trim a section to fit and extend another when construction is not ideal?
Who is responsible when something is not right?
And of course there’s getting UL listings for any proprietary electrical connections and issues of inspection for code compliance.
Prefabricated walls are common and are suitable for cubical farms. They tend to cost more psf than regular construction but can be depreciated as furniture and reconfigured more easily than site built walls and fixtures.
Yet, it’s ironic that we still end up with cookie cutter houses, but they are all built as if they are bespoke.
It is all commoditized and builders and trades people have choices about who they work with and long standing business relationships.
The inherent complexity of construction is a job shop scheduling problem which is not just in NP it is NP hard.
With a whole additional dimension of human social relationships and woven in. Everyone is trying to solve their own NP hard problem across a different set of projects and under a different set of constraints.
I think of it like the satellite industry. Crazy high launch costs and weight penalties make satellites expensive to build. Maybe there’s some rule that the cost of the satellite has to equal to the launch cost?
I think the same things happens to building prices when the land cost and available land is super limited. Construction kind of rises to take a piece of that?
I’m not sure if I’m explaining the idea well.
That said, searching for prefab walls brings up a lot of things, from whole wall panels, to just prefabed wall framing, and of course, prefabed whole houses. So, it's out there, it's probably a matter of what a builder is familiar with and what's cost efficient for a particular job.
