Tall & Urban News

Last week, construction of two major towers in Singapore reached completion.

The Clement Canopy complex consists of two 40-story towers with 505 luxury apartments, located in the heart of the city’s residential and Kent Ridge Education Belt districts. Each tower is 459 feet (140 meters) tall, and combined they are made up of 1,899 modules with weights ranging from 37,000 lbs (16,800 kg) to 64,000 lbs (29,000 kg).

UOL Group, a large real estate and property management firm in Singapore, is the project’s client as part of a development joint venture with Singland Homes. ADDP Architects was the project’s architect.

Clement Canopy is the first structure on the island to use an all-concrete version of the Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) system, where freestanding modules, complete with finishes for walls, floors, and ceilings, are produced offsite and then assembled onsite, according to Concrete Construction magazine.

In April 2016, the Singapore government awarded Dragages Singapore, a subsidiary of France-based general contractor Bouygues Bâtiment International, the contract to design and build Clement Canopy. Aurélie Cleraux, Bouygues Bâtiment’s head of modular construction stated that more than 60% of the two towers superstructure were built offsite. The modules were cast by a concrete precast manufacturer in Senei, Malaysia, in five days. The project itself required a total of 48 module shapes. The fit-outs were then completed in the contractor’s factory in Tuas, Singapore, within 15 days. The modules included mechanicals and plumbing, plastering, painting, and bathroom fixtures and tiles.

The contractor used two Liebherr 1000 EC-H 40 Litronic High-Top tower cranes to erect the towers. The Clement Canopy project was completed in 30 months, six months ahead of its initial timeline. Cleraux says most of this period was spent in designing and planning.

Cleraux explains that there’s a big push by the Singapore government to improve construction productivity. The benefits of modular and prefabrication processes, he says, are that they can reduce construction time by up to 50% while also reducing onsite labor by 30%. Other benefits include reduction of jobsite noise, pollution and neighborhood disruption, improvements in jobsite safety and quality of the finished product, and possible reuse of building materials down the road.

In February 2018, Dragages Singapore won a EUR€13 million (US$9.6 million) contract to build six more 15-story residential buildings in Singapore whose reinforced concrete structures will be 65% factory built.

“We are going to see a complete disruption in the next few years: our clients expect more efficient and faster building solutions,” Nicolas Borit, CEO of Bouygues Bâtiment International, told Global Construction Review last year. “Through the experience we have acquired on a number of projects, we are able to provide modular construction solutions today which fully meet their expectations, from design to the construction of the final product.”

For more on this story, go to Building Design and Construction.