Name: Yasmeen Sami Saadah
Student #: 0644623
Title: Importance Of Building Codes For Sustainable Construction Practices: A Case Of Construction Development For Abu Dhabi
Aim
The main aim of this study is to identify and to assess the importance of building codes in terms of structural strength, safety, reliability and economy leading to sustainable construction practices. These tangible advantages would be measured and analysed based on the primary and secondary data in this study.
Methodology
The primary research for this study includes, but is not limited to, quantitative analyses of buildings design data and personal interviews with the construction industry experts or contributors to building codes in other countries. Three cases of buildings selected for quantitative analyses would reveal the major differences in their all design components in both scenarios when building codes are not implemented and implemented. This comparison would also assess the sustainable construction tools and techniques implementation to see whether building codes could support or enable this or not. The proposed research design of this study is as follows.
1st phase: Secondary data from published documents: These documents are standard building codes of one developed country such as US code developed by International code council. Also, there are documents about which tools and technique are involved in the current practices of sustainable construction. This involves qualitative content analysis of documents.
2nd phase: This is primary data phase. However, findings from the 1st phase would reveal the variables (or factors) to be assessed based on the building code. This phase would analyse 3 existing high rise commercial and residential buildings in UAE. The findings from this phase would reveal tangible advantages or disadvantages of utilising codes. This involves quantities calculation from the design data.
3rd phase: Semi-structured interviews of construction industry experts, consulting civil engineers or architects, and experts who have directly contributed to develop or to design the codes. In this phase, researcher would discuss findings from phase 1 and 2 with these interviewees in addition to assessing the central theme of the study. This involves qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts.
Progress
My progress will be to submit my 1st draft of dissertation in phases as one chapter every month as shown in the Gantt Chart below. Accordingly, I am expecting to submit the final revised thesis on mid of November 2015.
