Eng. Ali Haj Shafiei, President of Delbrook Group, speaking to the attendees at the Build Your House Exhibition held recently.
Doha, Qatar: The fourth edition of Build Your House Exhibition (BYH 2023) in Qatar witnessed several officials, experts, and visitors paving their way to the Qatar National Convention Center. During the session entitled ‘Sustainable Residential Design Utilizing Building Intelligence’, Eng. Ali Haj Shafiei, President of Delbrook Group, a Canadian-domiciled sustainable developer, enlightened the visitors including young Qatari designers with thought-provoking insights.
The Peninsula spoke to a few Qatari visitors who expressed their enthusiasm for acquiring goal-oriented information.
Ahmed Al Amari, an architect student said: “It was indeed an eventful session where we could relate to the practical aspects of our learning.”
“There are a lot of insights I have noted down, which were helpful and by attending more sessions in the next few hours, I am hopeful of grasping more details of implementing sustanable residential buildings.”
Speaking on a lot of methods required to carry out to achieve the desired objectives, Eng. Shafiei began by emphasising the traditional ways to approach a sustainable residential unit. He said, “Traditionally a developer hires an architect, and the architect will then appoint an engineering firm.”
In this regard, he pointed out that the architectural-engineering firm will be suggesting contractors, and construction companies and then going on to hire a commissioning agent. He said: “Everyone possesses their own design tool and tries to optimize their profitability from their part of the process. Therefore, you will not obtain a product that gets the best performance for the lowest cost and lowest energy use.”
He mentioned the foremost essentialities to implement such as planning, designing, constructing, and operating. Highlighting the project management life cycle, Eng. Shafiei explained that the designers must establish baseline schedules like project planning of the startups, carrying out the plan with full commitments, and updating and monitoring the project until it succeeds. Eng. Shafiei said that “Heading towards completion of the project and success in early work makes the part flow easier.”
Stressing the carried-out project he said that it is vital to understand that nearly 80 percent of the expenses involved in a construction project are attributed to operations, hence demanding a reverse approach in planning.
Eng. Shafiei made note that the partnership between various team members like a vertically integrated industry must have new design tools and information exchange.
He then went on to expound the performance evaluation and preventative maintenance, environment and structural evalu-ation, scanning, and building and institutions among others.
Underlining the key dimensional virtues of Building Infor-mation Modeling (BIM), Shafiei said that it “is an object-oriented, data-rich, intelligent representation of the building”. The official also elucidated that the construction sector continues to be the prime challenge in making sustainable residential buildings.
