Going for gold

Mirdif City Centre.
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Mirdif City Centre may have opened last month, but the pressure is still on for Majid Al Futtaim Properties and its team of contractors, as they wait to hear if their flagship retail development will become the first mall in the MENA region to achieve a LEED Gold rating.

After submitting the required documentation, the developer is quite sure that it will reach its goal, but it will be a couple of months before the news – good or bad – is announced.

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FEATURED COMMENT I find it quite surprising that this building is going for a LEED certification, I hope that this does not include the p   1 Comments Read more comments »

“We have done a lot of pre-calculations and we are fairly confident that we will get the certificate,” says Majid Al Futtaim senior vice president for project management Jonathan Emery.

Under LEED v3, launched in April last year, between 60 and 79 points need to be achieved for a new construction project to be rated as LEED Gold, while the ultimate Platinum rating requires 80 points or above.

So why didn’t the client aim for the highest green accreditation?

“We set ourselves the target of LEED Gold, which was the highest standard we felt, was in our push,” Emery explains. Adopting the green system, however, created a lot of challenges for both the client and the contractors during the construction of the mall, says Peter Cummings technical director for WSP, the MEP consultant on the project.

“At the time of inception of the project, the LEED rating system was very new to the region and was also new for the majority of the team.”

To help overcome this challenge an education programme was run, introducing all team members to LEED. And, as time went on, a number of employees became LEED certified professionals.

“Frequent workshops were held throughout the project design and execution phases. These workshops comprised representatives from every discipline to help drive LEED credits through,” Cummings adds.

During the construction of the project, 20% of energy consumption was saved through various initiatives, such as the selection of sustainable building materials and the reduction of construction waste.

The client looked at reducing the amount of waste physically generated by construction and therefore invested in tools that could be used time and time again, such as shuttering – a type of formwork equipment.