When you buy offsite today, you are locked to one factory. You should be free to shop the whole field.

An offsite project today binds you to one factory. You sign that factory in DD or CDs, but the proprietary system still comes back to you. The factory design is its own. Its connections are its own. That factory can run slow, price high, or close, and you have no second source.

The deeper risk lives in the design stage. You inherit one supplier’s design team. The team thinks about your building for a few weeks. Its rushed choices become the building you own. You carry the mortgage for thirty years.

Specifying the open standard changes the power structure

Prescribing conformance to these open standards rewrites who holds the power.¹ Write CfOC standards into your RFPs, and any qualified factory can be a source of pre-designed elements. Your suppliers compete on catalog price and speed-to-market, not on lock-in. These shared interfaces let a module from one factory meet a module from another with zero coordination. Your purchasing power funds an open market in this process, not allegiance to one firm.

What open standards do for you

CfOC builds the open standard that makes this possible. The first of them is CfOC-ICC-1220, the standard for dwelling unit utility connections. It is developed in the open, with experts, through an ANSI-accredited consensus process. It is free for anyone to specify or build to. No firm owns it. A developer can require it without enriching any single company, which is the whole point. The standard improves over time (like the USB port did), and shepherds connections today toward broader interoperability² tomorrow.

What the Center for Offsite Construction does

The work proceeds in four steps:

1. Name the shift, so the market you are buying into is legible.
2. Map what it requires, so a specification can point to something real.
3. Ship the open-source pieces — the standards, agreements, and file formats — for any owner to require.
4. Help early adopters apply them on real projects.

Propose a pilot

The fastest way to prove this is a real building. CfOC is building a pipeline of candidate pilots: projects already in motion that could demonstrate open, standard-based delivery. A pilot demonstrates the open standard itself, on neutral ground. It points to no single manufacturer.

CfOC cannot yet fund these pilots, and says so plainly. CfOC can help shape them, bring the open standard and the field’s expertise to the table, and connect a willing owner to the work. A proposed project today is a place in line as the capacity grows.

Already producing

• CfOC holds ANSI-accredited standards-development status, with the first open connectivity standard in active development.
• Government already seeks CfOC’s expertise, from Ulster County’s modular plan to a New York Federal Reserve roundtable of local officials.
• The Models of Delivery map lays out the full path toward a competitive, swappable supplier market.

Two ways to begin

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Want to keep learning? The Philosophy essays on this site make the deeper case for why building is changing and what it means. →

1. From the Center for Democracy & Technology’s essay “Interoperability is Important for Competition, Consumers, & the Economy” (this quote is about open internet, but note the principles are the same for construction) “… interoperability is key to competition. It creates the opportunity for competition by enabling different providers of a service to interconnect with and seamlessly transfer data between each other, so that users of that service can communicate with each other regardless of which provider they choose.” ↩︎
2. From Merriam-Webster: interoperability noun in·​ter·​op·​er·​a·​bil·​i·​ty ˌin-tər-ˌä-p(ə-)rə-ˈbi-lə-tē : ability of a system (such as a weapons system) to work with or use the parts or equipment of another system ↩︎