Building Classrooms of the Future Today
iMod Structures (IMS) is transforming classrooms and how they are built. Combining advanced technologies and progressive new approaches to building design and construction, IMS is designing, manufacturing and installing DSA approved high-performance, pre-fabricated “Future Proof” classrooms that are designed specifically as healthy and sustainable 21st Century learning environments.
Our high performance classrooms are easily and cost-effectively relocatable to accommodate a school district’s shifting demographics and budget requirements. Our innovative iMod moment-frame design enables 40 feet of clear span, requiring no interior columns, structural walls and/or trusses. Our classrooms are also tech-ready, capable of integrating new innovations and digital teaching tools without interruption.
Meet the iMod Team
IMS was founded in 2009 by John Diserens and Craig Severance, two former members of a successful real estate investment trust. John and Craig bring to IMS complementary prior experience in real estate finance, sales, marketing, development, design, manufacturing and construction. In 2011, Reed Walker joined the company, adding decades of experience as a general contractor with a focus on the modular building industry. Reed has been instrumental in the design of the IMS iMod Building System, and now oversees the production and further innovation of it.
In 2009, IMS formed a joint venture with A.P. Moller-Maersk (“Maersk”) to design, finance, manufacture and transport IMS high performance buildings to major markets around the world. Maersk invested several million dollars in the R&D of the new technology-based IMS high performance building system and financed initial prototype buildings.
The goal of the joint venture was to create a building system that leverages the size and footprint of a traditional shipping container, making it easy and cost effective to transport anywhere in the world through established standardized methods, while utilizing an innovative new building system that is reconfigurable, relocatable, sustainable and long lasting. The iMod Building System is a result of that joint venture.
Maersk and IMS utilized a heavy steel, innovative moment-frame design to create an iMod that achieves forty feet of clear span in a multi-story configuration without requiring internal structural columns or walls or external trusses. We also engineered an intra-floor bolting system that precludes the need to weld iMods together, greatly simplifying and expediting the process of adding (or subtracting) modules in either vertical or horizontal configurations.
By 2011, IMS had installed its initial prototype buildings in Portsmouth, Virginia, Guam, Chile and Haiti. In 2014, IMS pivoted its focus to the market for school classrooms in California.
In 2018, to accommodate full commercial production, IMS leased a 100,000-square-foot former Navy submarine factory on Mare Island located one hour north of San Francisco.