Working with Scandinavian Industrialized Building System (SIBS), POJI and MOKO helped realize a modular city concept located in Järfälla municipality of Stockholm, Sweden, with 350 apartments, communal areas, restaurants, small shops, and a preschool in a pleasant mix with experiential architecture and greenery.
In the middle of timber country is the 20th largest city in Sweden, Karlstad. It’s also home to POJI, a small, but nimble engineering company helping modular factories and developers automate their processes with ease across Sweden and Europe.
Per-Olof “P-O” Hulthe, CEO and founder of POJI, works in partnership with Patrik Jensen, CEO of the construction consulting company MOKO, to create “configurators to help speed up the development process overall,” says P-O.
“MOKO and POJI work as a close team,” said P-O. “We are seen as one team, usually with Patrik taking the lead on doing structural design, production drawings, developing building systems, and more.”
The two function cohesively, helping modular manufacturing clients to meet evolving energy and building regulations by providing digital automation tools that are integrated across various departments such as architecture, MEP, and structural integrity.
POJI works with configurators for structural analysis, while MOKO works with configurators for shop drawings, both of which aim to “decrease time and cost for producers and increase quality,” said P-O.
The two companies joined forces in 2016, according to Patrik, first developing automations of shop drawings for a concrete factory in Sweden. They combined their designs so P-O could automate the finite element modeling for these buildings, and the duo found great success.
In total, the two firms have worked together to design over 14,000 modular apartments over a period of seven years and their services have helped clients increase quality, cut expenditures, and save money over time.
As Patrik noted, design and engineering plans can typically take anywhere from five to 10 percent of the project cost on average. With their systems and designs, POJI and MOKO have reduced that percentage to approximately 1.5 percent of the total project cost.
And in Sweden, it’s coming at an increasingly important time as housing and living costs rise.
In Sweden, A Modular Home is Like Any Other
Much like in the rest of the world, Sweden is in need of affordable housing. POJI sees the opportunities for modular to step in to help create affordable housing in conjunction with local government agencies—also known as municipal housing companies or MHCs in Sweden—to address this issue.
According to P-O, people in Sweden don’t bat an eye at modular multifamily buildings. In fact, it is a commonly accepted method of construction.
“A modular building doesn’t define the building, it only defines the way it’s produced,” he said. “[Tenants] in general don’t care if it’s modular or not, and it is not seen as low-quality, but rather the opposite.”
About 85 percent of Swedish single-family homes are built in factories, according to Patrik. The majority of the housing industry is also dominated, he says, by 2D panel systems or 3D volumetric systems.
Part of this is due to the approach that Sweden historically brings to housing. In the post-World War II era, the Swedish government made big investments in modernizing construction, with a particular focus on prefabricated housing. In the 1960s, the government even offered loans to companies that were able to produce large scale housing projects quickly—enabling modular construction to emerge as the preferred method.
Additionally, Swedish banks view modular construction as lower risk thanks to automation. These processes provide better quality control and cost predictability, according to P-O. There’s also the risks of on-site construction, which can be difficult to manage.
“I mean we have rather poor weather in Sweden, so we don’t have any nice days to erect buildings,” he said. “But with an industrialized production system, depending on your on-site assembly, the time spent installing is much, much shorter for multifamily buildings.”
Even with a rich history in modular, the construction industry in Sweden has slowed down in recent years due to a host of issues, according to P-O. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine contributed to the slowdown, while the 2022 election brought a stop to various subsidies and support programs for multifamily rentals.
Sweden is also unique in that its public housing opportunities are not means- or income-based. MHCs in fact own about 26 percent of all multifamily buildings, according to a report from the Journal of Housing Research from Scandinavian University Press.
Swedish Housing as the Vanguard of Sustainability
Sweden has been at the forefront of sustainability through the promotion of energy efficiency in buildings since the 1950s. POJI’s risk assessments highlight efficient ways for Swedish houses and apartments to meet both national and regional standards. However, there are newer and newer regulations that are emerging from Sweden’s Boverket—the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning.
About seven or eight years ago, Boverket introduced a series of energy consumption thresholds that new buildings are required to meet, according to Patrik. They have also become “progressively stringent” over time, going from 149 kWh per square meter for existing buildings to 75 kWh per square meter per year for newer buildings. And the numbers keep getting smaller.
There’s also the transition toward more sustainable materials like wood, as the construction industry moves away from concrete and steel.
But it’s these same regulations that drive demand for efficient building systems like the ones created by POJI and MOKO.
“The benefit with an offsite system of course that you have the building system defined,” said P-O. “So when it comes to reporting those requirements and reports of all the materials, we already know what materials we have. And with an automated process, of course we also know how much is in each building and it’s easier for a modular system.”
SIBS factory in Penang, Malaysia.
Building Houses for Everyone, Including Colleagues
As part of their business offerings, POJI and MOKO work with manufacturers to speed up assembly through careful analysis of things like material control and bill of materials so the supply is never shortened. They worked with Scandinavian Industrialized Building System (SIBS) to help them reach the goal of manufacturing 1000 modules per month.
“We have a very slim organization that produces a lot of high quality documentation,” said P-O. “We usually say that we feed the beast, the factory being the beast, to help it produce up to 40, 50 modules per day.”
They also used their Configure-to-Order system, which is designed to eliminate the infinite variables in modular through a strict adherence to design plans, to create an efficient system that led to the creation of the Barkarby Block 15 project.
Barkarby, located in Järfälla municipality in the Stockholm metropolitan area, features 351 apartments and 11 commercial spaces. The project consists of 757 total modules, with production starting in October 2020 and finalized by April 2022.
According to Patrik, the municipality that awarded the project to SIBS was so pleased with the designs from POJI and MOKO because
the renderings and the final result were nearly identical. In fact, one of lives in one of the apartments.
“That’s another way of saying that you have control, when you pair the visualizations of the project before it’s made and then the actual photograph afterwards and you can hardly tell the difference,” said P-O. “Of course one is a rendering and one is not. But building wise, the outcome is exactly what you anticipate it to be.”
Even with all these successes, POJI and MOKO still experience a variety of challenges that required some creative thinking. A project three years ago presented some difficulty, as they were trying to figure out how to build a three to four meter tall module on the ground level for retail spaces.
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t deliver due to the transportation rules for such a high module,” said Patrik.
By contrast, in the U.S., a concrete podium would be developed to solve this issue, says P-O. “But the solution that we went for here was an industrialized system of 2D panels instead to make that podium and then put the regular modular system on top of that.”
The Future of Modular Housing in Sweden
For P-O and Patrik, the future of modular housing Sweden lies very much in the hands of regulators and evolving environmental impacts from construction.
The two of them see an increase in the impact of transportation on the overall environmental performance in modular construction.
“I believe is that we will in the near future see more and more small factories,” said Patrik. “Also, if we could use more robotics coupled with our automated design, perhaps it’s not that important where the factory actually is. But if it could be closer to the end customer, it’s better.”
There is also the impact of AI on their internal processes to improve efficiencies on the whole.
“I encourage all my employees to use AI as much as possible with caution of course,” said P-O. “We use it as much as we can to for rapid development and improving our processes and all of that. We don’t use it that much for the delivering on projects, but we use it to develop our own methods.”
About the Author: Karen P. Rivera is a freelance writer and editor with a passion for storytelling. She is a former United Nations-based reporter, with experience covering international breaking news, venture capital, emerging healthcare tech, and the video game industry.
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