Hand a child a tub full of Lego bricks, and it won't be long before she shows off what she's built. When footwear company Skechers brings buyers through its offices, made from reconfigurable walls, doors and furniture, it does the same.

"In essence, office furniture sells shoes," said Jesse Cassem, multimedia director for Skechers' advertising department.

The department boasts magnetic glass wall panels, bright white desktops and file cabinets, sliding doors and cutouts for multimedia equipment and electrical components. "The space looks and works as fantastically as the original installation," enthused Jason Greenberg, Skechers' senior vice president for worldwide advertising.

Skechers put its California advertising offices together using 3D modeling software and made-to-order building materials that snap into place, all provided by Calgary-based Dirtt Environmental Solutions.

"By making [components] act more like Lego and less like raw materials, the design is quickly constructed by clicking together in a universal way, yet the outcome is always unique to the client's needs and desires," Dirtt CEO Mogens Smed wrote in a December blog post.

Dirtt claims its products cut construction-related waste. Its components can be sized to precisely fit a building shell, says Julie Pithers, Dirtt's executive in charge of business and community development. This enables clients to choose smaller real-estate footprints, reduce heating and cooling costs, locate offices closer to transit or even make efficient use of historic buildings, she says.

"We're saying right from the get go: make less waste, almost zero waste, on the job site," Julie Pithers, Dirtt's executive in charge of business and community development said. Without needing to cut new studs or install drywall, clients can also remodel frequently, as Skechers has done.

Earlier this month, Dirtt – which went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in November – announced $12m in new contracts. Among its new clients are a 48-story Oklahoma City office tower for oil and gas producer Devon Energy and a hospital in Saudi Arabia.

Previous clients have included tech giant Google and several health care facilities. One, Detroit Medical Center, transformed an unused storage space into a patient observation area, enlisting Dirtt to avoid the risk of drywall dust and other materials contaminating the rest of the hospital.

"Modular" has been a sustainable design concept for decades: a famous example is Interface's modular carpet tiles, created by the later-acquired Heuga brand more than 50 years ago. In the case of carpet tiles, the idea is to reduce waste by making parts interchangeable, so that a piece can be replaced when it's damaged instead of replacing the whole thing. In the case of Dirtt's modular offices, the idea is to keep companies in existing buildings longer and to reduce construction waste from remodeling.

"The greenest building is an existing building because of all the embodied energy that goes to making a new building," Pithers said.

Dirtt is part of a wider modular-construction movement seeking to make the industry more efficient and productive. In New York City, for example, a 32-foot tower under construction in a Brooklyn factory for the nearby Atlantic Yards project will be the world's largest modular building.

But how much of the problem does this really solve? Up-to-date figures on the extent of the construction waste problem are scarce. The United States alone trashes 170m tons of construction materials a year, but that widely cited US Environmental Protection Agency stat hails from 2003. Some of the figures Dirtt, which stands for "Do It Right This Time", uses in its corporate documents are even older, reaching back as far as 1998.

Dirtt's aluminum frames – the company admits to using mostly "virgin" aluminum, which raises concerns about the energy intensity of mining – are lighter than steel (and thus easier and cheaper to transport), recyclable and reusable. Meanwhile, paints, lacquers and stains are water-based, and tiles are cured with ultraviolet light, not super-heated ovens, so finishing takes less time, and, the company claims, doesn't release emissions.

It's not all about the hardware, though. Using Dirtt's ICE software program, facilities managers and architects navigate 3D visualizations of buildings in a mashup of furniture store room layout planners and first-person shooter games. Designers virtually rearrange interior walls, doors, electrical and multimedia cutouts or other features. As they change layouts, ICE updates project prices in real time. (Exact prices aren't available because they differ from project to project, Pithers said.)

ICE then sends finalized plans to the nearest Dirtt manufacturing facility (in Calgary, Phoenix, or Savannah, Ga.), where components are barcoded with precise measurements to be cut, shaped and sent to the worksite.

"Construction is still working in many ways as the 19th century approach," Pithers said. "It's probably the biggest laggard in innovation in nearly all industries. This is a chance for it to completely skip over the 20th century and get into the 21st century."

Building information modeling, or BIM, software like ICE is growing increasingly popular with building professionals, said Maruja Torres-Antonini, an architecture professor who teaches sustainable design at the University of Florida. She hasn't used ICE or Dirtt, but is aware of both.

"It ties together all the different steps that go from design toward installation of a design," Torres-Antonini said, but added that the software and the company's sustainability claims aren't totally unique.

"All those sustainability claims that the Dirtt people make can be made by other companies that work in prefabrications," Torres-Antonini says. "What it seems to me is their system is perhaps better packaged than most and it actually looks very nice."

And despite positive impressions of Dirtt's products, some architects who have toured facilities using them don't expect to become customers.

"The product is super well-designed, but we've had a hard time being able to use it on any project because it tends to be more expensive," says Craig Davis, a principal architect at Portland-based GBD Architects who toured a Dirtt-furnished Google office in Seattle.

It makes sense for corporate clients who constantly change their interiors, Davis said, but it's not financially feasible for many building owners. Moreover, he said, those of his firm's products that pursue Leadership in Environmental Engineering and Design, or LEED, certification recycle 95% of their materials.

In its sustainability documents, Dirtt calls LEED a "placebo," a sentiment similar to one held by many architects.

"It's something that we try to address and have struggled with over the years," said Scot Horst, vice president of LEED for the US Green Building Council. The USGBC wants to incorporate lifecycle assessments into LEED, Horst said, to acknowledge not just how much waste a building keeps out of a landfill, but how much raw material it uses in the first place.

"What we're trying to do is encourage people to just make smarter decisions based on what their situation is, instead of us prescribing that there is good and bad," he said. Although he's not particularly familiar with Dirtt, Horst said such products can help people make those decisions.

Torres-Antonini said she appreciates that Dirtt doesn't limit its ambitions to LEED certification and that its reconfigurable nature limits other impacts.

"Buildings are not final products," she said. "Buildings have a life. They're used and re-used. The nature of work, increasingly today, is very complex and flexible. Many companies do find themselves in the need of re-configuring spaces and adding on or allocating new uses."

Meanwhile, Skechers is preparing to dive into its bucket of Dirtt parts again. It's considering using Dirtt's products in an upcoming re-design of its entire Manhattan Beach, Calif., headquarters.