In article on modular construction, NY Review of Architecture discloses that ill-fated 461 Dean was the subject of three audits

Francis Northwood's July 25 New York Review of Architecture essay, Some Assembly Required, has the subheading, "Can architecture be remade in venture capital’s image? 

The answer: maybe not. 

The article begins with 461 Dean, aka B2, which did not, as original developer Forest City Ratner promised, "crack the code" for high-rise modular construction, but rather was delayed and suffered leaks (as I reported for City Limits back in 2015):

IF YOU WERE TO SCOUR NEW YORK CITY for the future of architecture, the last place you might look is the rump’s end of the Barclays Center. As first impressions go, 461 Dean, the mixed-income residential tower that rises precipitously at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street, checks all the clichés of contemporary large-scale construction. Artless setbacks do little to alleviate the problem of boxiness that blight so many of the new glass high-rises on Flatbush Avenue.... But the discordant façade conceals a feat worthy of your attention: 461 Dean was entirely constructed out of prefabricated steel modules—930 in total—that were assembled at a nearby factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Upon its completion in 2016, it was the tallest modular building in the world and to this day, it remains the tallest in the United States by far. 

...For reasons beyond height, 461 Dean features in this [modular] canon, despite having neither the sculptural appeal of Moshe Safdie’s ingenious Habitat 67 housing complex in Montreal nor the suburban sublime of a Levittown. Its significance instead arises from both its prolonged construction and the numerous audits that followed. From this imbroglio emerged a pair of new modular companies that promise to succeed where all previous attempts have failed—to bring about a sea change in modular construction not just in New York but across the country.

(Emphases added)

About those audits

The article focuses mainly on the new companies. The main one, Assembly OSM, was formed by the entrepreneurial firm SHoP Architects, which designed B2, and is "largely intertwined" with SHoP. But I'm most interested in the aftermath of 561 Dean:

“Things didn’t go the way we wanted them to,” [partner] Christopher [Sharples] told me over a video call. SHoP’s website continues to describe 461 Dean as a “landmark technological achievement,” but Christopher now downplays his firm’s contributions: “We developed a very comprehensive Revit model for that project, but the contractor decided not to hire us to develop the actual instruction model for that building.” After Skanska’s departure, SHoP was brought back to help finish designing the modules. 

According to Christopher, bad press around Dean Street “impacted [SHoP’s] brand” and caused the brothers and their coprincipals to reexamine their design methods.

Interesting. So they got the Italian car designer Pininfarina to audit 461 Dean. Also commissioned for audits were the car manufacturer Tesla and the veteran New York construction firm Turner Construction. Writes Northwood:

The audits reaffirmed that incorrectly managed tolerances had played a fundamental role in accentuating misalignment and construction problems. This heap of documentation also highlighted the “critical elements” necessary for handling tolerances in the future. There was the module’s steel chassis, which the architects needed not only to be the framework for the enclosure of the module but also its structure and its alignment system so that all the modules could fit together.

So, they had not "cracked the code."

The court battle

It's not clear from this summary whether the audits assign degrees of responsibility, a determination never resolved in court. As I reported, Skanska, in its legal battle with Forest City criticized the developer's team.

It said SHoP and the engineering firm Arup declared the prototype work successful, stating that it "failed to simulate the actual erection sequence in several critical ways," for example involving unfinished units, or too few units to simulate "an over-constrained field condition," or going vertically just two stories, thus unable to test compounding tolerance errors.

The case ended in a murky settlement.

The rest

There's much interesting stuff in this long article (nearly 4,900 words), so it's worth a read. 

One tart observation: "Combining design-build contracts and uber-outsourced construction, Assembly OSM looks less like a modular construction company and more like a logistics company."

That, however, presents "potential ethical problems, especially given the opacity of present-day supply chains."

Assembly OSM, though it talks up affordable housing, sees demand in data centers and even military production, Northwood reports. There are, apparently, more codes to crack.