Emerging as Required

  Ye Ming, Director of the Technology Division of the Housing Industrialization Promotion Center of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, who attended the inauguration ceremony, pointed out that every move Beijing makes in the development of building industrialization technology affects the industrialization development of the whole country. By strengthening investment in scientific and technological research in Beijing and forging its own path, the city can better drive national development. "I hope the newly established research center can fully grasp the two core issues of technology and the industrial chain, and promote the modernization of the building industry," Ye Ming said.

  As a long-established large state-owned design enterprise, the Beijing Institute has accumulated years of experience in engineering, technical reserves, talent training and cooperative resources, and building industrialization is no exception. As early as 1959, the Minzu Hotel project undertaken by the Beijing Institute had already adopted a prefabricated frame-shear wall structure. Over the past seven years, the Beijing Institute has participated in all links of the upstream and downstream industrial chain of building industrialization, including policy and standard formulation, basic scientific research and applied research, prefabricated building system solutions, design methods, key product and technology R&D, and inspection and acceptance standards. It has completed 200,000 square meters of industrialized residential design and holds contracts for about 300,000 square meters.

  "The requirement to transform the growth model has brought huge development space for building industrialization. The company's establishment of the Building Industrialization Engineering Technology Research Center at this time can be said to enjoy the right timing, geographical advantages and popular support," said Fan Zesen, head of the preparatory work for the research center and Deputy Director of the Tenth Design Institute of the Beijing Institute. He stated that in addition to the maturity of its own and external conditions, the transformation into an enterprise and restructuring of the system was also an important reason driving the establishment of the research center.

  It is understood that last year the Beijing Institute officially restructured from a self-supporting public institution into a state-owned enterprise, and the pressure of transformation and upgrading followed. "From the company's decision-making perspective, we hope to build some of our advantageous specialties in the industry into a series of special technology research centers or special architectural design centers, so as to better realize the integration of production, learning and research," Fan Zesen revealed. The Beijing Institute, proceeding from the perspective of innovation mechanisms and science and technology leadership, will first launch a series of special technology research centers, and the Building Industrialization Engineering Technology Research Center is the first. In the future, more research centers may continue to be established in the two areas of technology research and architectural design.

  Fan Zesen introduced that for many years, most of the institute's design departments have centered all their work around business activities, mainly doing more work and collecting design fees, which has invisibly affected the progress and innovation of scientific research. The establishment of the new center is intended to concentrate talent from inside and outside the institute to focus together on research into special technologies. "The institute has based this research center in each design department, so that the research center does not face too much business pressure and can focus on research. At the same time, the research can also be combined with the production and operation of frontline teams," Fan Zesen said. He believes that technology and business complement each other, and making technology bigger and stronger is of great help to developing the market and building the brand.

  Acting in Line with the Trend

  It cannot be ignored that real estate enterprises generally have their own design departments, and the design departments of some large real estate companies are even at the leading level in the industry in terms of scale and strength. How to develop its own advantages and achieve resource complementarity has also become a key issue that the Beijing Institute needs to solve in the future. In this regard, Fan Zesen said that the design departments of real estate enterprises and professional design institutions focus on very different points. Facing the same technology, a design institute may pay more attention to how this technology is used in engineering practice and solves engineering problems, that is, using technical means to solve technical problems. Real estate enterprises, however, first consider what advantages and disadvantages this technology may bring to their operations, for example, the use of industrialization technology can achieve goals such as reducing labor costs; they focus on the overall operation of the enterprise rather than the technology itself. From this perspective, design institutes have a more intrinsic motivation for technology R&D than real estate enterprises. Therefore, in the future the Beijing Institute will also follow this difference and continue to focus on technological progress and large-scale application in the industry.

  Materials from the meeting show that after its establishment, the new center will follow the technical route of green, openness, refinement and integration, focusing on strengthening research in fields such as green building industrialization, sustainable building lifespan, refined residential design and informatization foundations, building a platform for industrialization technology R&D and application, establishing a training base for building industrialization talent, and at the same time consolidating and expanding cooperation with real estate enterprises, the government and builders, so as to expand new fields and achieve new development in the direction of building industrialization.