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In the past when people thought of modular building technology (if at all) it tended to be the grey prefabs built by Yorkon's parent company that characterised schools up and down the land that sprang to mind. Not any more though. Not content with doubling its profit to £3.8m in just three years by building popular housing and healthcare facilities, Yorkon is in the process of unleashing a host of other innovations. These include curved modular buildings, a new school design system and even more options that can all be built in its factory and safely delivered to the site. Its clients such as Tesco Express, Carillion and Cartwright Pickard all rave about the company and now so do we.

The BPTW-designed Tramway House in Bexley Heath, a key development area of the Thames Gateway

Runners-up

Alumet Systems

Anybody who’s ever had any building work done on their house will be able to sympathise with Alumet’s ambition to speed up the wall-building process. That something was the Avon Dry-Wall Beam. This is manufactured off site and is used to form the interior walls of buildings instead of traditional cement block. The results are not good news for brickies. Construction time for interior walls slashed by three quarters, the overall construction time cut in half, and clients saving up to 50p per m2 of wall. No wonder repeat business is up a quarter to 95% this year.

ThyssenKrupp Elevator UK

It sounds like a situation that only Bruce Willis could get out of – two lifts in just one lift shaft. However ThyssenKrupp insists that its TWIN lift scheme really isn’t that hair-raising. The company is playing its cards close to its chest in terms of how the system actually operates, but the 350m-high Moscow Federation Tower in Russia is proof that it does. More importantly, TWIN meant the Russian scheme needed nine less lift shafts allowing the building’s owner to squeeze in vital extra square footage of floorspace.