Can MMC make more liveable medium-density suburban housing viable?

Plus Studio director Ian Briggs has spent much of his career shaping apartments and urban precincts. His growing interest in MMC comes from an architectural question: can industrialised construction help Australia deliver better medium-density housing in the suburbs where people already live? (main image: MULTIKit’s Pavilion system uses a mass timber kit-of-parts approach for five- to eight-storey residential buildings. MULTIKit is not associated with Ian Briggs or Plus Architecture.)

Ian Briggs’ interest in modular construction begins with architecture — and with a question about whether Australia is building the right kind of housing in the right places.

A director at Plus Studio, Briggs has built his career around architecture, master planning and urban development, with a particular interest in how buildings respond to their surroundings and contribute to the wider urban fabric.

In conversation with Built Offsite, Briggs argues that the starting point for MMC should not be the factory system itself, but the type of housing and neighbourhood Australia needs — and whether industrialised construction can help deliver it.

Briggs’ interest in modular housing took on greater focus during a visit to Tasmania in 2022.

He studied architecture in Launceston in the 1990s and has maintained connections with friends who remained in the state. During a visit to Hobart, conversations about housing affordability turned to the type of housing being provided.

The prevailing response to affordability, as it was described to him, was essentially a large detached house on a substantial block increasingly distant from the centre of the city.

Briggs questioned the model.

“What about medium-density housing?” he recalled asking. “How do people get to services when they’re living so far away? Do they really need a five-bedroom house?”

The Hobart conversation sharpened Briggs’ interest in modular construction, giving him a clearer connection between housing density, affordability and the way buildings might be manufactured and assembled.

The concept itself was not new to his practice. Briggs says he and his colleagues had encountered Australian modular systems and their proponents on and off since about 2007. But the housing discussion gave MMC a different relevance.

An architect’s view of density
The connection between architecture and modular becomes clearest when Briggs discusses Melbourne’s middle suburbs.

His argument is not simply that Australia should replace conventional construction with volumetric modules. It starts with density.

Briggs sees the townhouse as a relatively familiar and lower-risk proposition for developers, but questions how far that typology can go in responding to the scale of the housing shortage.

“I don’t see townhouses as being a particularly applicable solution to a housing crisis,” he said.

His preference is for residential development of around five, six or seven storeys — a scale he believes can provide greater suburban density while remaining comfortable and liveable.

“I think that’s a really good scale for a middle-ring suburban city,” Briggs said. “I think it’s a good scale to live at.”

It reflects the broader design thinking that has shaped his architectural career.

Briggs’ work at Plus Studio spans buildings and urban precincts, and his approach places considerable weight on context — how people experience buildings, how buildings relate to the street and how development contributes to the social and spatial structure around it.

His interest in five-to-seven-storey development therefore extends beyond simply adding dwelling numbers.

Briggs points to the relationship between population density and the services that make neighbourhoods function. Discussing Melbourne’s traditional street grid, he refers to the density needed to support a corner shop, cafes, small retailers and other services within walking distance.

That also brings infrastructure into the equation.

Lower-density expansion requires roads, water, sewerage, electricity and other infrastructure to extend over greater distances. Increasing population within established urban areas can make more intensive use of infrastructure and services that already exist.

The housing question therefore becomes broader: what density supports a functioning local community, and what built form can deliver it without sacrificing liveability?

MMC as the means rather than the objective
This is where Briggs sees a potential role for MMC.

“If traditional construction is too expensive to meet our social values, then there needs to be a different way to deliver our social values,” he said.

“And if that means it’s modular, then that is a way to do it.”

That distinction is central to his position.

Briggs does not advocate a particular manufacturing system regardless of circumstance. Asked whether he favoured panelised or volumetric construction, he described himself as theoretically “agnostic”.

Panelised systems can make sense for lower-rise housing. Volumetric construction may become more attractive where repetition, speed, labour availability or site conditions favour completing a greater proportion of the building in a factory.

Transport, cranage, weight, access and module dimensions all become part of the design process.

“I’m fundamentally more excited about volumetric modular,” Briggs said.

For architects, that introduces a different sequence of decisions.

A building designed conventionally cannot necessarily be handed to a modular manufacturer late in the process and efficiently converted into an industrialised product. Architecture, structure, services, logistics and manufacturing need to be considered together.

But Briggs’ argument runs in the opposite direction to allowing the factory to dictate the architecture.

The urban outcome comes first.

What kind of neighbourhood should be created? What density supports local services? What height and scale provide places people want to live in? The construction system then becomes a means of delivering that outcome.

From cottage industry to housing supply
Briggs also sees an Australian modular sector that still has some distance to travel.

He describes much of its development as fragmented — populated by capable businesses and individual systems, but often operating without the volumes needed to materially affect housing supply.

Without repeatable projects and commercial-scale manufacturing, he argues, the industry struggles to progress from one-off projects to sustained housing delivery.

Yet Briggs also rejects the idea that prefabrication itself is somehow foreign to mainstream construction.

“The idea that modular is new and weird and different, it’s a furphy,” he said.

The larger challenge is making MMC part of normal development rather than something turned to only when conventional delivery is under pressure.

Briggs said the challenge is making MMC part of the industry’s “regular repertoire”, rather than something associated primarily with emergency housing responses.

For Briggs, that may ultimately depend less on promoting modular construction for its own sake than proving it can help architects and developers deliver the kind of mid-rise housing Australia’s established suburbs increasingly need.

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