China is today the most dynamic construction market, in either traditional and modular construction. The last erected Shanghai Tower in Pudong Shanghai is an impressive footprint of this dynamism.

In this field, China faces several challenges: the urgent need of a quicker, cheaper, and more sustainable constructions methods (Sustainability and quality are the cornerstones of the new National Urbanization Plan) to provide accommodation solutions for its ongoing huge urbanization (100 million rural residents are expected to move to China’s cities over the next decade).

The Hunan-based Broad Sustainable Building, a 57 storey skyscraper, 800 apartments, is an outstanding example of the pragmatic response to those challenges. The prefabricated construction technique made it the fastest building erected in the world, within 3 weeks. Three storey per day. Before that, the company spent 5 months building and assembling 2736 modules in factory.

Conclusion: Deployment of prefab and modular building methods can significantly reduce building time comparing to traditional construction, which translates into major cost savings and environment protecting. That was the obvious conclusion, the less obvious one is that China is taking the lead in modular buildings.

Construction materials manufacturers, designers, architects, project managers and other actors of the construction market in China are shifting their way of thinking and methods to make modular and prefab construction as the future plinth of their building industry. We have the chance to live this « revolution » from within.