Construction Management Guide

by Andrew Ness

The spreading trend toward “green” building has resulted in a number of competing and overlapping certification systems, with only faint hope in sight of better standardization. United States builders are most familiar with the LEED system sponsored by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Through USGBC’s association with the World Green Building Council, LEED is now available in almost 60 countries, spanning the globe from Malaysia to Morocco.
Starting in 1996, Canada’s Building Research Establishment developed its Environmental Assessment Method. This then evolved into an online assessment and rating tool owned by BOMA Canada, known as Green Globes. BOMA Canada then licensed Green Globes to the Green Building Initiative (GBI) in the United States to compete with LEED. To raise its “market share” GBI has applied to have Green Globes accredited by the American National Standards Institute.
Outside of the Americas, the BREEAM standard promulgated by BRE in the United Kingdom has become widely used and adopted for use in Europe and the Gulf Region, with approximately 110,000 buildings BREEAM certified. There are also a number of national and local standards. France has the HQE system, and about 70% of the commercial buildings built in Australia since 2002 have been rated under the “Green Star” system. In Italy, a regional standard known as Protocollo Itaca was developed for specific regions, but has now been divided into two separate and more streamlined standards.

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by Karen Gough

The general principle is that subject only to the “fraud exception” claims for payment under Advance Payment Guarantees (“APGs”) and Performance Guarantees or Bonds (“PGs”) should be met on demand. The Courts have not been kind to those resisting payment, even when the claims are doubtful, potentially dishonest and/or clearly overstated.

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by Melanie Grimmitt

If you’re based in the UAE, the answer to the above question is probably not.

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by Andrew Ness

The U.S momentum to build “green” is rapidly gaining popularity, with the office market currently leading the way toward more sustainable structures. The construction industry, including the publishers of form construction contracts, is scrambling to keep up. ConsensusDOCS, a relatively new group of industry organizations that is promoting a family of contract forms that have been released in a steady stream since 2007, has now provided a document for contractually assigning the parties’ respective liabilities when entering into contracts for a green building.

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by John Bishop

There is a funny commercial that you can see when you take a taxi in Shanghai. You can view it on a video screen on the back of the front passenger seat. It features a foreign businessman getting into a taxi in Shanghai and telling the Chinese taxi driver the address of his destination. The taxi driver does not understand English and starts asking the passenger where he wants to go in Chinese which the passenger obviously does not understand. At this point, the taxi driver and passenger transform into a chicken and a duck and both are clucking and quacking away with neither understanding each other. The commercial is for a road directory service whereby a passenger can punch in an address on the video screen in English and the address in Chinese is announced to the taxi driver. I think the commercial is pretty neat, and is a play on a Chinese description of a situation where both parties lack a common language (literally translated as a chicken trying to talk to a duck).

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by Karina Chichkanova

In recent years St. Petersburg has earned a reputation as an investment center with numerous greenfield projects. Greenfield projects involving the construction of industrial and sports facilities, transportation infrastructure, and residential developments, are underway. In the auto industry alone, four assembly plants have been built recently or are under construction (Toyota, Hyundai, General Motors, Nissan), and component and parts suppliers have a number of greenfield projects in progress. St. Petersburg has also established a technical-innovational type special economic zone, where a number of greenfield projects relating to the creation of innovative products are underway.

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By Lisa Dale & Steven Hunt
Since the advent of Dubai’s construction boom circa 2002, fuelled by the relaxation of restrictions on property ownership by foreign nationals, thousands of new residential property units have been completed by developers and handed over to their new owners for occupation. This relatively recent phenomenon of home ownership on any significant scale has heightened the need for both contractors and developers to understand their potential legal exposure to home owners when defects begin to appear in the properties that they have either constructed or sold to them. [Read more…]

At this stage the project brief should be finalised, a preferred option agreed and the detailed design should be delivered within the identified parameters of cost, time and quality. Clear definition of the project is necessary in order to attain a successful outcome. [Read more…]

Construction sector in the UAE witnessed a massive drop in costs during the past 12 months. Prices of most materials dropped by more than half compared to 2008.

Producers and distributors said they experienced a difficult year as reduced cost coupled with falling demand led to severe drop in revenues.

Most affected were ready-mix companies. Many of them had to cut their production by more than 50 per cent and send several staff on leave in order to reduce operational cost. [Read more…]