Hotels must involve engineers at an earlier stage of property development to avoid escalating maintenance costs, said engineers at a roundtable last week.
Director of engineering at the Courtyard by Marriott Dubai Green Community and Marriott Executive Apartments Dubai Creek, Wael Farouk, said: “Engineers are being bought in at such a late stage, and it is very difficult for us to then change things which have been done wrong.”
“Designers and architects are very good at making the vision of the owner come to fruition; but what we need to be able to do is sit down with them and say ‘that’s great, how do I maintain it?’, because the architects are not designing things to maintain equipment,” agreed IHG Dubai Festival city director of engineering Gilles Despres.
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The engineers, who gathered at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City for the roundtable discussion, agreed that property refurbishment gave engineers a chance to put their strategies forward.
“Refurbishment is something we can put our stamp on,” Despres said, “When you are involved in a refurbishment, it is your chance to have an input and make a real difference to the property.”
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Mar 25, 2011 , USA
Until the Owners get smart enough to realize the importance of life-cycle and sustainability implications of this lack of communication they'll continue to pay the price for their ignorance. When projects are initially proposed and given integrated project delivery methodology where engineers are...
Mar 24, 2011 , India
The reason behind this is something else also.All structures need maintenance,and during emergencies it is the engineer whois called on to attend and very rarely an Architect gets field exposure to study such problems.People who enforce site control are always well versed in identifying defects...