Since we have, in the past days, experienced construction from the point of view of contractors, it was scheduled for us today to go and have a look to project design from the perspective of designer / consultant. Our targeted company is ERGA engineering consultants which is DCC’s main design consultants.
ERGA is a Lebanese consultancy and design firm established in 1982 by Mr. Elie Gebrayel and his wife Mrs. Randa. It has 12 offices around the world mainly in the Arab world (Morocco Algeria Dubai Abu Dhabi Erbil , Bahrain Saudi Arabia France
Around we arrived to ERGA offices and met with Mr. Joseph Sawaya who presented an overview of the company. Afterwards, Mr. Elio the company contract manager informed us about the procurement strategy followed at ERGA. Main points of discussion were the procurement selection, procurement types and pros/cons, contract selection, forms and benefits.
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| ERGA's Offices |
The rest of the gathering covered specific designs of several DCC/ ERGA projects. Since on Tuesday we have visited the Kindergarten school site, it was useful to have a glimpse of the architectural, structural and MEP drawings. We tackled the different architectural aspects from conception to substantial completion of the project, and we compared what we viewed on site to what is existent on drawings. Furthermore, we went through constraints and difficulties encountered due to legislative, practical and safety requirements.
One of the projects we discussed is Burj El Salam located near the world trade center on sheikh Zayed road. The tower is a combination of a residential building, hotel and offices. The design aspects of the project, to be visited in the coming weeks, concluded our visit to ERGA. This project is special in a way that it was handed over to DCC/ERGA for correction and completion of previous design. Moreover, drawings were reproduced and construction was pursued accordingly.
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| Presentation about ERGA and its projects |
After our lunch break, Mr. Amir A. Kolahzadeh, the business development manager at IT Works LLC, a company founded in 2006 that wanted to add value to green buildings, gave us a lecture about IT infrastructure and building information modeling. After a brief introduction of IT Works and its relation with DCC, he defined IT infrastructure and its usage to provide smart solutions in commercial/residential developments, healthcare, education, data centers and smart cities. Our cities are tending to become intelligent where sensors like RFID (Radio-frequency identification) can be used to detect people and assets in hospital instead of paging or calling doctors and searching for medical equipments. Moreover, in the future, parents can track their kids and assure that they are attending classes by automatically receiving an SMS if the integrated sensor did not detect the student. One example he gave was a way for your hotel room to know you were coming through your use of the Key Card in the elevator. This would allow your air conditioning or lights to turn on when you get home. This way you wouldn't have to leave them on the entire time you are gone; ultimately, saving money and energy. Mr. Amir made it clear that IT infrastructure is a very important aspect of engineering, even thought many people are resistant towards it. This resistance mostly stems from lack of knowledge about the products. It will be interesting to see the things Mr. Amir talked about implemented in buildings in the future.
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