Project Frog built a school in a warehouse.

Or at least, part of a school. The "componentized" building company — Frog management dislikes the terms "prefab" and "modular" — put up a life-size model of one classroom, a hall, and a couple other rooms in their warehouse on a San Francisco pier.

It was a trial run for the first school in Frog's new line, which it calls the "Impact" platform — a quickly erected, easily reproducible, cost-saving approach to schoolhouse construction that will allow schools to include advanced facilities that are unaffordable with current building techniques.

The warehouse model is 2,400 square feet of what will eventually become the new 19,000 square-foot building at Santa Ana's El Sol Academy. Though they faced multiple delays this spring — demolition is still yet to begin at the existing location and actual construction isn't slated to begin until July — Project Frog nonetheless says the building will be completed by Thanksgiving, just under three months later.

El Sol is Frog's latest attempt to streamline prefab. By designing whole buildings in-house, the story goes, Project Frog can cut out a lot of wasted effort and materials, and thereby, a lot of the price. They love to point out Boeing as an example, saying if that company can build an airliner in a little over a week, why do buildings take months or years? If you start with a bunch of interchangeable parts, you can assemble them rapidly without sacrificing quality, and even add elements other methods aren't able to.

"If you make it simpler, it goes faster, and there's less chance for things to go wrong," says Ash Notaney, Project Frog's vice president of product and innovation. He estimates the company can build a school for around $200 per square foot, as compared to an industry-standard of $280 to $300, according to Frog. General Electric believes him, and led a $22 million round of funding for Project Frog in 2011.

The big idea is to decrease complexity and increase repetition, building faster, cheaper, better, small to medium commercial buildings like schools and health facilities. To do that, the company starts at the design stage, holistically, incorporating architecture, design, and even the supply chain. "We look at it as an opportunity to rethink everything," says Notaney.

(Project Frog isn't the only company trying to make efficient, componentized buildings; last fall Wired profiled Broad Sustainable Building, a Chinese company that built a 30-story skyscraper in 15 days.)

But it's not so much about the big picture. Really, Project Frog is about the details.

The way they build a ceiling is a good example. In a traditional building, a contractor would put up the ceiling. Another might put in insulation, while an electrician would be called in to wire it up and attach lights. The Project Frog team designed the ceiling as a whole, so they were able to integrate a DC powered LED light fixture right into it, negating the need for an AC system. The result (pictured below) is vastly simpler and easier to install.

Project Frog's ceiling design (right) as compared to a traditional ceiling. Image: Courtesy of Project Frog

Additionally, Project Frog's walls pack flat, IKEA style, as interchangeable 8-foot panels that get placed on pre-poured foundations.

Frog's previous buildings have been mostly small and unique, and expensive, like the Golden Gate Bridge Pavilion and several one-off environmentally friendly schools. But their renewed focus is on reproducible schools and health facilities. Take a design for a school, say, and deconstruct it into elements — classrooms, hallways, facilities, bathrooms — and then recombine those in different blocks, wings, and floors to make unique schools that are composed of common elements.

The savings they make this way will allow Project Frog to include features that would otherwise be engineered out, says Notaney. That means motorized blinds, acoustic ceilings, phase change temperature control, and others. In some cases — depending on climate — that means the buildings can forgo traditional HVAC infrastructure, saving further time, money, and space. That's not something you can do when one designer is in charge of HVAC and another is in charge of insulation, Notaney says.

El Sol is already notable for doing more with limited resources. It's a public charter school, designated federally as a low-income, Title I school. But students, who are predominantly from recently-immigrated families, consistently exceed standardized test requirements, and the school exceeds California state Academic Performance Index requirements. They get dual-language (English/Spanish) immersion, and next year, they'll get a new building.

It will be welcome, says Monique Daviss, El Sol's executive director. The school's buildings have expanded haphazardly since it was founded in 2001, and enrollment is now nearly 900 students.

"We're doing it all on a site that is one Victorian house that's about a hundred years old, and a bunch of portables on concrete," she says. "When you come on campus, you get a distinct feeling of warmth and inclusion ... also it looks like they just threw this thing together."

Throwing the thing together is what Project Frog was trying to avoid when they built the prototype. Although it took eight days, it showed them they could still make some improvements.

Some were minor; they realized the font was too small on installation labels. Others required a more fundamental redesign. The floor, for example, was too bouncy. Frog had designed a new floor structure using an acoustical metal deck, but their modeling hadn't accounted for resonant frequency vibrations that compounded the floor's deflection. For El Sol, the floor will feature a new acoustic sound mat and will replace a gypsum-based concrete with a different lightweight concrete fill.

"These sorts of opportunities are often present on a normal construction project, but would often not get tracked and worked on because the situation is unlikely to be repeated," Notaney says.