About

What We Do

Assembly OSM delivers architecturally distinctive high-rise buildings through a technologically advanced process of digital design, manufacturing, assembly, and on-site installation.

Assembly OSM’s innovative building systems achieve buildings that are both beautiful and innovative — high-quality in performance, high-end in aesthetics, green in materials, and highly cost-effective in componentry, fabrication, delivery, and operating expense.  Perhaps most importantly, Assembly buildings entail a significantly reduced time to completion, with vastly improved cost- and schedule-certainty, compared to conventional projects.

Starting with multifamily residential projects in New York City, Assembly OSM’s systems are highly flexible and appropriate for project types as diverse as hotels, dormitories, healthcare facilities, factory housing, and office complexes, in nearly any geographic location.

Core Elements

Building-As-Product

We approach buildings as high-end products (rather than one-off projects), working alongside advanced manufacturing veterans of Tesla, SpaceX, and Boeing, as well as partnering with renowned AEC leaders like SHoP Architects, Arup, and Cimolai.

Systematized Flexibility

We have engineered an innovative, integrated system of manufactured components and sub-assemblies:  structural steel chassis; unitized facades; wall, floor, and ceiling cassettes; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and environmental systems; kitchen, bathroom, and casework pods; building cores with elevators and stairs.  Our structural system is parameterized, meaning that individual modules can take a wide range of different dimensions and shapes, enabling many different unit sizes and layouts within buildings that are unique and distinctive, fitting lots of any size.

Manufacturing and Assembly, Not Construction

Assembly buildings are designed (by Assembly), manufactured (by our supply chain), assembled (by Assembly), and stacked (by our general contractor partners).  Our process represents a generational advance in the delivery of buildings — this is not “modular” as the term is currently used in industry.  Traditional construction is marked by cost, inefficiency, waste, job safety, human error, disruption, uncertainty, and risk.  Modular construction is often marked by limited options, bland architecture, and cheap-feeling results.  Every element of an Assembly building is designed specifically for a high-performance, highly-automated fabrication and assembly sequence that achieves exceptional tolerances and high levels of quality.

Fabrication by Supply Chain

Assembly utilizes a diverse and redundant supply chain of pre-qualified component fabricators and sub-assembly manufacturers.  For each element of a building, we achieve competitive pricing and quality dynamics.

Platform

Assembly’s advanced software platform ties together the phases of building-as-product much like a car or airliner:  system design, project architecture and engineering, fabrication and manufacturing, logistics, assembly, and delivery.  Using information as the lifeblood of our process, our platform creates unmatched efficiency and transparency for all teams and partners.  Our engineers design our systems for manufacturing and assembly;  our architects design each building as a 3D digital twin that accurately embodies the dimensions and materiality of every single component;  our manufacturing supply chain partners communicate directly with the model to fabricate each part and sub-assembly with incredible precision;  our logistics partners track the movement of each element through space;  Assembly’s TIer 1 facility floor teams achieve extraordinary efficiency and accuracy by planning, organizing and executing assembly sequences via real-time visualization and metrology.

News

The Real Deal

Assembly OSM, a modular construction startup that has compared its process to putting together Ikea furniture, raised $38 million in Series A funding. The company was founded in 2019 by twin brothers Bill and Chris Sharples, principals of Manhattan-based SHoP Architects. Assembly calls its construction method “post-modular” because it is more akin to a car or aircraft assembly line than a traditional modular build-out, where the structure is put together on a single factory floor.

Assembly OSM CEO Andrew Staniforth with an illustration of the building design (AOSM)

Commercial Observer

Andrew Staniforth and MaryAnne Gilmartin first saw the potential for modular construction in Brooklyn years ago. Now, Staniforth, as CEO of Assembly OSM, is taking it to new heights coast to coast.

Andrew Staniforth and MaryAnne Gilmartin

The Real Deal

Modular construction firm founded by SHoP principals unveils first apartment: After raising $21M, Assembly OSM hopes to deliver on lofty promises for the multifamily sector.

Construction Broadsheet

Assembly OSM introduces its ‘post-modular’ construction model.

Architect’s Newspaper

Construction startup Assembly OSM wants to marry digital twin technology with modular building.

Construction Utopia

Startup Aims To Assemble Houses Like Cars – Assembly OSM brings auto and plane technologies to residential construction.

designboom

assembly OSM learns from boeing and spaceX to build smarter and faster housing

Fast Company

Why one architecture firm is looking at planes to construct buildings of the future


ABOUT

Advantages of the Assembly System

Building Quality

Just as a manufactured airplane is comprehensively superior in quality to one made by a garage hobbyist, Assembly buildings achieve a level of precision and quality in fit, finish, and feel that can’t easily be accomplished by human laborers working with hammers, saws, and tape measures.

Architectural Distinction

Unlike bland and repetitive modular buildings, Assembly buildings are unique, distinctive, and architecturally imaginative.  By employing design and manufacturing software and supply chain capabilities to their fullest potentials, the Assembly system combines repeatability of components and sub-assemblies with customization of building design and appearance, most notably in structural forms, facades, and interior finishes.

Speed

We can go from initial design to building completion in 40-50% less time — under 30 months, rather than 48+. Including convention foundation work and stacking and completion of modules, on-site time can be reduced from 36 months to 18 months.

Carrying Costs

Assembly’s developer-clients slash their carrying costs (land, financing, insurance, on-site security), achieve earlier sales and rentals, and can redeploy their capital into next projects.

Labor Cost

By moving from construction to manufacturing, Assembly significantly reduces the amount of inefficient labor required to deliver a high-quality, architecturally distinctive building.  We eliminate opportunities for human error. No RFI’s, submittals, or shop drawings removes the bureaucracy and miscommunication associated with conventional construction. 

Materials Cost

Increasingly as we scale, Assembly achieves cost savings in building materials through transparent competitive bidding, bulk purchasing, and the elimination of construction waste.

Certainty

With our configuration-to-delivery platform and manufacturing model, Assembly gives clients cost and schedule certainty.

Design-Build Single Point of Contact

Assembly’s design-build contract structure provides a developer/client with a single point of contact for the entire development process, including a feasibility study and zoning analysis, architectural and interior design (including AOR/EOR), supply chain procurement/management/fabrication, assembly, transportation, on-site erection and general contracting work (inclusive of excavation, foundations and a conventionally-built podium), all the way through to substantial completion/TCO and final close-out.  Similar to the benefits and efficiencies of the Assembly design-build manufacturing process as a whole, the single point of contact both streamlines the legal negotiation, drafting and contract maintenance processes, and reduces the law firm costs necessitated by the client holding multiple design, CM/GC, trade and other consulting agreements typically associated with a conventional design-bid-build development and legal framework.     

Regulatory Advantage

Assembly achieves overall regulatory approval for our building system as a system, meaning that individual permits for the buildings that use our system can be obtained in as little as 4 months (rather than the usual 12-18 months).

De-risking Development

For all those reasons, Assembly de-risks building development.  Moreover, Assembly’s platform allows clients and their financial partners to see, in real-time, exactly where the process is, where every dollar of procurement has been spent, where each fabricated component and manufactured sub-assembly is.

Resilience and Sustainability

Built from manufactured components, Assembly buildings are easier to maintain, repair, and upgrade.  We are focused on utilizing greener, more sustainable biomaterials such as mass timber (initially as finishes, but soon as core structural elements) and deploying advanced environmental systems that conserve energy.

Team

Leadership

William Sharples

William Sharples

co-Founder

Christopher Sharples

Christopher Sharples

Co-Founder

Andrew Staniforth

Andrew Staniforth

CEO

Assembly OSM was cofounded by Chris Sharples and Bill Sharples, two of the founders of SHoP Architects. The Assembly approach – fully-digital design and modeling, unitized components and sub-systems, a diverse and global supply chain of expert fabricators, and the application of advanced manufacturing and automation techniques – was born out of Bill’s and Chris’s ambition to find a better way to make resilient, high-quality housing for our cities. Leveraging 25 years of design excellence and digital innovation, SHoP created this new company to transform the way we make buildings through advanced manufacturing.