Prebuilt’s award-winning pavilion puts offsite delivery to work

Prebuilt’s Lagoon Reserve Sports Pavilion in Port Melbourne won Excellence in Prefabricated Building – Infrastructure at prefabAUS’s 2026 Smart Building Industry Awards, held in Melbourne on 3 September. The two-storey pavilion was delivered within an active reserve, with construction planned around public access and the site’s sporting use.

For Prebuilt chief executive Malcolm Batten, the project illustrates how the company approaches permanent modular construction: establish the design and stakeholder requirements, plan how the building will be manufactured, and coordinate factory production with installation on site.

Based in Kilsyth, Victoria, Prebuilt delivers bespoke residential and commercial buildings, including schools, hotels and community facilities. The Lagoon pavilion brings together change rooms, club storage, a canteen, public toilets and an upstairs community room with a kitchen and balcony. A passenger lift connects the two levels. The building was manufactured as 23 modules at Prebuilt’s factory, then transported, assembled and connected to services at the reserve.

Agreeing the design before production
Batten identifies design completion and stakeholder agreement as essential preparation for factory production. The design must be approved and the project team aligned on the scope before manufacture begins.

At Lagoon, Perkins Architects prepared the preliminary design and specification for the City of Port Phillip and remained project architect through construction. Prebuilt’s role was to deliver that brief through modular manufacturing and on-site assembly.

Early coordination gives the team a basis for planning fabrication, transport and installation around the building’s design and site conditions. At Lagoon, a range of uses and facilities had to be accommodated within the modular scheme, while the delivery plan accounted for how the reserve would continue to operate.

Using specialist fabrication
Prebuilt combines its own production capability with specialist manufacturing supplied by other businesses. At Lagoon, Page Steel Fabrications supplied robotically manufactured steel components. Batten says, “All the light gauge steel frames in that building were produced offsite” using DFMA-capable machines.

Those frames were incorporated into the modules at Prebuilt’s factory. The project shows how the company draws on suppliers’ equipment and expertise as part of its manufacturing process.

Across its steel-frame work, Batten says about 25 per cent is fabricated internally and 75 per cent supplied externally. That arrangement gives Prebuilt its own production capacity while allowing it to draw on the wider manufacturing base as project requirements change.

From factory fabrication to module installation, Prebuilt’s approach to offsite delivery supports the construction of the 23-module Lagoon Reserve Sports Pavilion in Port Melbourne.

Coordinating delivery around community use
The site programme at Lagoon had to account for foundations, drainage and module installation while maintaining access to the oval and its amenities. Prebuilt used screw piles for the pavilion’s foundations. The team also maintained the perimeter walkway, protected the playing surface and provided temporary public toilets. A preschool beside the reserve made careful coordination of construction activity especially important.

The client wanted the work scheduled to avoid disruption across two summer periods. “They didn’t really want to have it going over two summers,” Batten says.

He summarises the project’s priorities as “cost … time … and amenity”, including the effect of construction on the reserve’s use. Factory production helped limit the time and workforce required on site, while the installation programme was arranged around the facility’s seasonal demands.

Lagoon demonstrates how Prebuilt applies offsite manufacturing to a building designed for a specific community and location. Its delivery depended on the coordination of the architectural brief, specialist fabrication and on-site work, with the programme shaped by the need to keep the reserve accessible during construction.

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