The green bottom line

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Green buildings are not only more energy efficient but are also healthier and improve worker productivity which impacts directly on a company's bottom line. MEP Middle East speaks to Buro Happold principal Kevin Mitchell.

Mitchell began his career in the UK with a general MEP engineering consultancy. “I was really lucky as a young engineer to get involved in a broad range of projects, from healthcare to education, spanning large new-builds to very small projects. I spent part of the first eight months of my life as a consulting engineer on-site, so I got to see everything hands-on and exactly how things all fit together.” Mitchell recalls , as a 21-year-old, learning some very pointed lessons from a 60-year-old foreman who said: “This is what 8˝ pipework looks like; you have drawn it ten metres in the air. How am I going to get it up there?” .

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“From my graduate training I went into the R&D side. I was really fortunate to work under Terry Wyatt, ultimately one of the presidents of CIBSE in the UK, for about five years.” Mitchell says his research focused on technologies such as chilled beams and displacement ventilation, which at the time had only just been introduced to the UK market from Scandinavia. Similar to the Middle East, where this technology is only now starting to make inroads, it was faced with a different set of climate and humidity challenges.

“There was reluctance from many users and building owners, and especially developers in the UK, to adopt this technology into commercial office space. How do you rent the space? How will the market and the tenants react?” says Mitchell. His research on chilled beams and displacement ventilation focused on the potential of weatherproof, comfortable environments to boost business productivity. “If your employees are sick 15% of the time, and you can reduce that rate by 5%, you add 5% to the bottom line of your business.”

Mitchell was then introduced to multi-disciplinary engineering and the concept of integrated design, a key component of green building, an area that the Middle East market is focusing on at the moment. An important element of integrated design is engaging with “the user groups who are ultimately going to utilise the facility” so as to ensure their specific needs are met. This lead to a stint of healthcare and scientific-type projects for large pharmaceutical companies, such as laboratories, R&D centres and Greenfield hospitals in the £200 million bracket. “I guess this is where my heart lies, in the holistic design side of the industry,” concludes Mitchell.

Subsequently he worked in Canada from 2001 to 2005. “Culturally and business-wise I found it much more focused and very much more direct. The best way I can describe it really is that the Canadian market is a mixture between that of the American and the English. You had the North American commercial approach that was direct and task-focused, combined with the UK approach of analysing and prototyping. Importantly for me, it also was a multi-disciplinary, holistic design approach,” says Mitchell.