The Netherlands Leads Europe In Prefabrication Adoption

The Netherlands continues to spearhead Europe’s embrace of prefabrication in construction, maintaining its position at the forefront of innovative building practices, reveals the latest European Architectural Barometer report on prefabrication.

Country overview

The report highlights the Netherlands as the primary proponent of prefabrication, boasting the highest percentage of projects incorporating some form of pre-assembled building components. Dutch architects report that in approximately 47% of their projects, some form of prefab has been applied.

However, it’s not the country with the highest growth in prefab usage. This honour goes to neighbouring Belgium where architects reported a notable substantial surge in the number of projects containing some form of prefab, elevating the prefab usage to an impressive 46% compared to 33% in 2023.

In stark contrast, countries like the United Kingdom and Italy exhibit the lowest integration of prefab elements into their architectural projects, as indicated by architects surveyed. However, the assessment does not differentiate between the types of prefab methods employed. For example, the usage of modular building elements is the highest in the UK.

Overall, European architects report a slow shift towards more sophisticated prefabricated systems such as panelised solutions and modular building elements Architects across the board anticipate a continued uptick in prefabrication utilization, foreseeing its growing prominence in the industry.

The persistent need for swifter construction, cost-efficiency, and reduced dependence on skilled labour remains the key motivators for the sustained advocacy of prefabrication techniques in the long term.

The insights you are reading are extracted from the European Architectural Barometer, a quarterly research publication through which we regularly assess the state of the construction industry. The research represents the opinions of architects from 8 European countries. In each research edition, we include a detailed overview of our predictions for future building volumes, and each quarter, we investigate different topics that currently shape the sector, such as sustainability, BIM, prefab, orientation behavior, and many more.

Here you can check our latest editions of the European Architectural Barometer.