He traveled to Europe with Natale Albertani, an Italian wood en- trepreneur who built the Chilean Pavilion at the Milan Expo. Albertani later advised them on the construction of the Maipú plant and also on engineering houses based on wood panels, which they call 2D. They started with the Elemental House to which they made small architectural changes to industrialize it. Today, six years later, the construction itinerary is already defined and flows according to the rhythm of the orders that come to the company. They offer a process in which they can receive all kinds of projects from an architect and they are in charge of developing it with their construction system, using BIM for the architecture and specialties, and then, with Cad- works software, to generate the information for the robotic construction: nail by nail, screw by screw, each perforation and assembly instructions. Felipe Montes points out that this is the longest stage of the process, taking about two months. "If the project is finished, frozen, it is fast; but many times during this stage, changes are requested by the architect or the estimator. All the definitions are made in this digital construction”. He explains that the first machine that goes into action is the wood or beam-sizing machine; it is like a robot, it has different tools and it cuts the wood, makes the perforations, and processes each piece. Then, all those elements are put together, taken to the wall assembly area, and then the wall goes to another workstation where the fasteners are installed and the perforations for the electrical boxes, window openings, etc. are made. "Everything that requires precision is done with numerical control. Each nail goes exactly where the estimator said it would go, unlike traditional construction, where it is up to the carpenter where he puts each nail or how many nails he puts in. It is checked until the client signs the plans digitally or approves them," he adds. The name of this system, known worldwide, is Marco Plataforma. The frame is made of wood with sills and the posts are made of bilaminated wood. The platform part gets its name because a mezzanine is placed at the bottom, on top of it goes the frame, then another mezzanine and thus it is assembled upwards. All the joints use screws. For buildings, another type of hardware is used, called hold down. This process is oriented according to the Design for Assembly (DEA) concept. E2E's general manager specifies that "everything is designed so that assembly is super-efficient, fast, and problem-free. The key is to solve all the complexities and problems at the plant in order to reduce them on-site. With this premise, the platform and the different walls are manufactured, considering that the largest one measures 12m x 3.2m, the precise dimension of the trucks that transport the panels”. In social housing, the aim is to have as few panels as possible, in order to have fewer crane movements, and mainly 6m x 3.2m walls are considered, because they have better transportation efficiency. The cranes are contracted by the hour, so their work must be done as quickly as possible. The company works with structural, dry, and impregnated wood, as well as bilaminated pieces. Felipe Montes says that in Chile there are still prejudices regarding wood construction, considering them as light structures; but once the quality of the materials used is understood, this condition changes automatically. He says that when they started the company he traveled out of Santiago to visit sponsoring entities or housing committees and took samples of wood, screws, and nails so that they could see that E2E operates at a different standard. He adds: "What we have always said is that with the same wood, the same technology, the same professionals and workers with whom we build 20,000 or 35,000 UF houses, we build social housing. Since we use numerical control machines, we cannot use low-quality or non-structural wood because the numerical control system detector would reject it. We have our shareholder Arauco who also supports us with very good quality structural wood”. The Marco Plataforma system relates well with the house's other parts and materials. "Anything that is industrialized coexists very well with the
industrialized," he explains. "The windows coexist well with the system's millimeter spans. If steel beams are needed, there is no problem."They also work together with other industrializers and, for example, have built projects in which the first floors are made of concrete and the second floors of wood. In Valdivia, for example, a clinic was built with the radiol- ogy sector in concrete and the rest in wood. In the short term, they will start to build 5-story DS19 buildings in Linares, and they are building an office for a fishing company. Another advantage is the assembly of these construction panels compared to modules. The social housing units are delivered ready to assemble and can be transported five per truck, versus the modules that fit one house per truck. To assemble the panels, they use standard ten-ton cranes, which are available throughout the country, and they can rely on local labor. So, the system is quite flexible. The company can build 80 houses per month, and on-site each crew brings a crane and assembles one house per day. After the Fires “We operate under two scenarios: private and social housing. The ideal scenario for us is large-scale real estate projects, hopefully, repetitive houses," says Felipe Montes. "Although we also build custom homes; for example, we built two in Cachagua. We have never wanted to have a catalog, as almost all the industrialists in the world do, because clients always ask for changes”. Recently, real estate companies that want to switch to industrialization and others that choose to build in wood by foreign investor mandate have been arriving at the plant to quote projects. Banks are also giving better rates if the project is sustainable. Regarding social housing, he recalls that President Boric's Government Plan included the promotion of industrialized construction as a way of complying with the Emergency Housing Plan for 260,000 housing units in the four years of his term of office. At the beginning of the Emergency Plan, Ditec, the Technical Division of Housing Study and Promotion from the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, contacted E2E informing us that they were going to certify industrialized plants and housing. "We told Ricardo Carvajal, former director of Ditec: We have a plant here, it is at your disposal. Therefore, the first house we certified is called Casa Ditec E2E because that Division made it and it is the first industrialized housing type authorized and delivered by Minvu for the Housing Emergency Plan", comments Felipe Montes. "I was very impressed by how well we worked with Ditec, we had regular meetings designing the house so that it could be produced in a very efficient way and with very good quality", he says”. However, despite the good start, there are still some pending issues. The 2024 summer fires in Viña del Mar dramatically increased the housing deficit in the country. Six thousand homes burned and, Montes explains, the fires showed that any material can be destroyed. "Here con- crete, masonry, everything burned. What was left of reinforced concrete was at about 800 degrees, in other words, structurally, nobody would certify that concrete anymore. The reinforced concrete steel suffered and it is not possible to build on it”. He also says that the fire is random: not all the houses in a sector burned, one burned, two were left standing, and so on. It is not possible to demolish by blocks, it is necessary to go house by house. Likewise, as an example, he mentions the Manuel Bustos settlement where all the sites are different and the houses are also different, there are no paved streets, and the trucks got bogged down and could not go up. "It is super complex because there are a lot of slopes, and also because everything is quite compressed. We had to pass the crane around the neighbor's house and the panels over the top of that house to assemble," he says. There are other sectors such as El Olivar, which are more consolidated. Nevertheless, those were neighborhoods from the late '80s. "They are all dissimilar houses, without any standards. Besides, what I was saying before one house burned, another one didn't, another one did, so you
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