The third reason for hope came to me in maybe the most unexpected place: a two-hour stand in the toilet on a train with five others, due to huge overcrowding.

The UK was the first to mandate Building Information Modelling and our standards became quite widely adopted, or were at least used as a starting point, globally.It will be interesting to see if construction Platform design has a similar global appeal, once people have understood the limitations of modular.. COVID-19: accelerating the shift to construction Platforms?.

COVID-19 has simply accelerated this journey, or accentuated the need to move forwards at speed.As a result, the UK government is now looking to double down on the current plan to develop construction Platforms and to make things happen even more quickly.This should send a strong message to the construction industry.

This shift is coming.We've already seen other sectors - entertainment, retail, music - being disrupted over the last 25 years.

Rather than resisting the process, the big players of the construction industry need to acknowledge the reality of where we’re heading.

They should be evaluating the types of opportunities this will create and figuring out how to shape themselves in order to take advantage of those opportunities.In this context, we have converted offices to pilot labs with a high density of fume cupboards and clean room facilities.

We have also built an incubator/accelerator project; a lab building for startups.The principal MEPchallenge here is catering for the air change requirements, which are clearly much higher in a laboratory than in an office.

Doing this has been greatly helped by the 3D modelling that was carried out on the original project.. HVAC upgrades at the Portway.Also on the Granta Park is a building called Portway.