Elevating Exteriors: The Criticality of Façade Refurbishment in the GCC

Imagine a skyline dotted with high-rises, each a testament to architectural ambition and economic growth. What happens when these towering structures, built around the same time, begin to show their age?

In this episode of the WSP Anticipate Podcast, Susanna Noureddine, Head of Facades interviews Andy Dean, Senior Technical Director - Asset Transformation at WSP in the Middle East to explore how facades age, and the potential risks of neglect. More importantly, the discussion highlights the strategic planning and preparation needed to address the current situation of buildings in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. 

Unable to listen to the full episode? Fast-forward to the key discussion points via the players above or read the key takeaways: 

Discussion Points

00:00 Introduction and Overview

06:13 The Aging Process of Facades

09:55 The Problems of Neglecting Facade Maintenance

25:04 The Urgency to Start Planning and Assessing

32:13 The Role of Designers and System Suppliers

38:24 The Need to Start Addressing the Challenges Now

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Transcript

amressayed (00:01)
Imagine a skyline dotted with high -rise, each a testament to architectural ambition and economic growth. What happens when these towering structures, built around the same time, begin to show their age? I'm Susanne Novedin, head of facade engineering at WSP in the Middle East. In this episode of the Anticipate podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Andy Dean, Nutshell's colleague, friend, and one of our senior technical directors for Asset Transformation.

at WSP and in today's episode, we will explore how facades age and the potential risks of neglecting their maintenance. More importantly, we will also discuss strategic planning and preparation for refurbishing these buildings. With a wave of high -rise expected to age simultaneously, the challenge is immense, but so are the opportunities for innovation and improvement. So Andy, thank you for joining me today and welcome to the Anticipate podcast. I'm very...

delighted, very happy to and very honored to have the pleasure in interviewing you. Yeah, welcome. Thanks, Susanne. It's great for you to invite me onto it. It's a really good opportunity for me because there's a really serious message that I want to try and get out to the region, the GCC in particular. I think that it's an incredibly important message. I think that if we don't get this, if we don't get what we need to do done in the next 10 to 20 years,

I think we could have some really big societal problems in the GCC, which would be an incredible shame based on all the work we've been doing for the last 20 to 30 years. Okay, great. So, I'm pretty much looking forward to our discussion and to get our audience on board and to address the issue to someone who does not know anything about facades and who is new to the GCC. What do you think is the crux to the issue we have? Well, I think there's

There's probably a bit of scene setting to do there. And if you'll indulge me a minute, my prediction is that existing asset projects will replace new built projects through the next 20 years and will become the dominant market. So that's just a little bit of scene setting. And look, there's an inevitability to aging. And what we built in the nineties and the noughties, and since then it's all aging. They're just like everybody, just like everybody, us. And so there's nothing we can do about that. Also globally.

There's been obviously an incredible awareness now and sign on to the COP accords. And, you know, we've hosted in the UAE, for example, just one of the GCC countries, we've hosted the COP 28 and the GCC nations have signed on to that. Also, there's a maturing stakeholdership as well. There's, you know, a lot of very senior people here have now been away to university, grown up through the management and then in top management.

There's an ownership level in the region, which is very much aware now and has an international perspective on these things. And like I said, if we don't get this right now, if we don't address the issues that I'm about to explain on this podcast, I'm really worried that there'll be issues through the GCC on a societal level. Thanks for that introduction. But before we go into the details, would you give us like a little bit of a background of who you are? I mean, I've known you now for I think eight years.

nearly, or at least I've been, I know that your name is floated in the market, especially here in the Middle East. I think you have been one of the leaders in shaping the facade industry in the Middle East. So yeah, please give us a little bit of a background in your career history and who you are. Thanks, Susanna. Yeah, I'm known to a lot of people, but hopefully that's a good thing. Well, I think the reason for that is I've had some great opportunities. I got to the Middle East in the mid nineties.

So approaching 30 years ago, and I set up on behalf of the company that I used to work for, I set up a facade testing facility, facade testing. So we tested weather tightness of facades, so air infiltration, water penetration, thermal effects. So we're really measuring how facades work. Also the same for fire performance, also the same for acoustic performance. And then about 10 years ago, I moved from the testing and certification space.

into the design space, into the consultancy space. And I've been really lucky because I was in Dubai relatively early. I've been really lucky to get the opportunity to contribute to codes, code development. I've had the opportunity to be given some great platforms on which to, to speak about things that I was concerned about many years ago, like ACP and fire performance, acoustic performance, and how glass and, and, you know, facades can affect people's health in

things like hospitals and schools and productivity and offices and things like that. So I think I've just had a great opportunity over the last 30 years to use the various platforms and the various great platforms that we have in Dubai to send out some messages. But over the last couple of years, I've turned my attention to facade refurbishments in particular. I've always been involved in failure investigations. Any laboratory does that. You often get involved as a third party.

Failure investigations are in my genes, if you like, they're in my genetics, they're part of kind of my history. But refurbishments arguably is kind of a similar thought process. You're taking something that was built, that was performing, maybe either isn't performing the way it should have been performing, and now either needs to be brought back to performance or hopefully performance enhanced and brought up to current levels of expectations.

So it goes, what I do now, what I've recently transitioned to goes hand in hand with that history, if you like. And because I've got that unique kind of that history and the length of history here, it's just a great opportunity. And in doing that though, a couple of things have occurred to me that I think that a lot of people are missing. And so this is a great opportunity now to kind of get that information out there. Okay. So over the past...

30 years, right, you being in the Middle East and especially during your design stage of your career. What do you think would be the problem if we don't start refurbishing facades? And what do you think we as facade designers should consider during the design process to make it easier and or longer lasting? Well, there's three main things really. There's, you get a drop in energy performance.

That's one of the things. So as things age, performance drops. So if you're talking about facade, you're talking about thermal performance. So our ability to keep the sun out, our ability to keep the heat out in the GCC context, of course, different in other parts of the world, that decreases. Also, and really importantly for the GCC, you get air infiltration issues. I'll explain a little bit later if you give me the opportunity that

you know, gaskets and sealants and things like that are very much an issue for that. But air infiltration is a huge problem for the Middle East. But you also get water penetration. People will say that we don't get a lot of rain here. We don't, but we do wash our buildings a lot because they get a lot of sand on the outside of them. And also we get condensation as well. So again, we do have water to deal with. And when you get a drop in performance, you get cost increases and also potential damage that can become a more serious issue.

The second thing is aesthetics. It's not the least of our issues, but it's, it is an important issue. You get coatings that corrode and start to flake off. Glass starts to become cloudy as the double glazing units of the seal on the double glazing units fail. I'm sure you've seen that yourself, Susanna. And, you know, it is unfortunately inevitable. It's not something that, it's not something that won't happen if you leave a facade long enough. And, but generally, you know, facades, which are essentially the

the clothes of the, of the, and the skin of the building, which is incredibly important. The first thing you interact with when you come up to a building, you see the facade, it starts to look old and untidy. And why that's so important is because revenue then starts to decrease. If you're renting out your building or you're, you know, you've got people who are in the building, they just move on to the next building. Cause we are building a lot new all the time here. So

That, and as revenue decreases, you get less maintenance, et cetera. And it becomes actually a far reaching problem. But probably most importantly, you start to get safety issues. So because of the air infiltration, you start to get mold. So you get condensation first and that condensation creates a great opportunity for mold. And so you get mold patches appearing and kind of marks around the facade.

You actually get corrosion of the structure as well as that gets further advanced. I've seen on frankly, multiple occasions, glass actually falling out of building. I don't want to be alarmist here, but it does happen and it has happened and it is a function of an aging facade usually. But also, and this is again, a crux that I'll come onto later. You get a loss of protection. So the job of the facade is to keep the outside out and the inside in.

Be that keeping people out or in, be that keeping, you know, weather out or in. And once you lose your performance of your facade, you lose that protection. Obviously then risk and liability increases and we don't want that to happen. So essentially that's what happens if we don't refurbish a facade.

I think with the recent weather changes in the region, especially in Dubai, cloud seeding, the heavy storms we have, the endless high rises and a lot of more people moving or migrating into Dubai, the quality of apartments, I think probably everyone can relate in what it means to get water in. When you leave the house without putting on the air conditioning for a couple of weeks, you come back and there is mold issues that we all, I think, experience that.

on a daily basis, but we cannot relate where it's actually coming from and what's the bigger issue behind it. No, so probably a design issue and then like a maintenance issue. With all that, what you have explained about what happens if we don't refurbish them or maintaining the facade properly, what would be the first indicator of where you would say this is like an aging facade and how do facades age within your experience?

Yeah. Well, I should also say that, because you mentioned it there, Susanna, that, because you mentioned HVAC systems essentially, you know, when you come back from your, you come back home and you kind of, things are a little bit humid when you get in and all of those kinds of things. Of course, when the facade stops performing, it actually puts pressure on other systems in the building. They start having to work harder. And remember, they'll be probably of a similar age to the facade of that state. So everything starts to get more challenged in the first place.

To answer your questions about how facades age, well, ultimately, it really depends on the material. And in that respect, it's a really salient and important part of the issue that we have. So you've got aluminium, obviously, and steel and metal, you know, but aluminium doesn't corrode particularly quickly. Generally, on a facade, don't get me wrong, I've seen plenty of issues where...

If it's in a particularly bad situation, it crawls very quickly. I was looking at building to the day and the base of the facade had got covered in sand, literally sand had started to build up against the facade. And when it was cleaned away, the aluminium was actually gone. You know, we've got a highly corrosive environment in the GCC. We have a lot of humidity. We have a lot of salt in the air. It's a coastal environment. There is a good deal of pollution here. It's a city and a lot of heat.

You know, aluminium, if you, if you put it in a worst environment, you'd bury it, it'll, it'll be completely gone. But that, but generally on a facade, on the, on the most of the facade, it won't be a problem, but you might get coatings that start to peel off. So again, the aluminium isn't a huge issue. It's not, certainly not in the kind of first couple of decades. You've got ferrous metals in there though as well. We typically, we use aluminium for our framing systems, but we use metal, ferrous metals, so steels and stainless steels for our fitting, the fixings.

And we don't really want to be having those in an environment where you have an electrolyte, so condensation or water. But again, that's not typically one of the biggest issues because even that wouldn't be the first to go under most circumstances. The big problem that we have in the Middle East, and I want to focus on the GCC in particular, because the GCC is where the biggest issue is for what we want to say today, it's polymers. Polymers, I'm talking about sealants.

Now, be that silicon or polysulfides or polyurethanes, talking about gaskets. And again, typically they might either be silicon or EPDMs and plastics, plastics, maybe things that we use as spacers or other elements within the facade, polyamides, for example. When they are subject to UV and heat and solutions and pollutants and salts, they harden and they crack. Essentially we have these

elements, particularly the sealants and gaskets, we have these elements in our facade for flexibility. Usually they're providing a membrane that's for expansion, or they're providing a gasket in between say glass and aluminium that has to retain water tightness or air tightness, or they're creating the air barrier. Well, as all buildings move, you know, constantly on a daily basis, particularly, you know, in a hot, in a solar, high solar environment, moving in and out.

They on a daily basis, they have to retain their flexibility. As soon as they start to harden and crack, you lose the thermal break of say, for example, of a gasket. So your gasket starts to conduct more heat, but more importantly, it doesn't open and close like it used to. So it lets air in, it lets water in. And let's make no mistake about this here. Our biggest problem, and again, a lot of people don't realize this, so I'm going to spell it out.

Our biggest problem in the GCC in particular, particularly the coastal regions, is air infiltration. We have, particularly in the summertime, an inexhaustible supply of hot, humid air. You know, it might be 35, 34, 35 degrees in the daytime. That doesn't feel very humid, but it is when it's 45 degrees C. And when, you know, the temperature drops in the evening, as we've all felt here, that races quickly to 80, 90%. Well, if you've got hot, humid air,

constantly, 24 hours a day, that humidity, as soon as it touches a colder surface, will condense. And that condensation has to be managed. Now, if you manage a facade properly, yes, the condensation moves outwards. But if the gaskets of the facade start to fail, and then you start to let air into areas where it shouldn't be, well, then you start to get condensation that flows inwards instead of outwards. So you might see...

You might see air infiltration on the back of plasterboard or on furniture. During Covid, many of the hotels were mothballed and the rooms were closed and so they weren't ventilated. Sometimes ACs were turned off. And in a lot of cases, people either came back to, or hotels came back to, apartments which were full of mould, in wardrobes, on clothes. And it's a very real problem. I spend most of my working week these days

working on buildings, obviously the existing buildings and existing assets. And one of the most common complaints right now is mold in the first place, that's what you see, and then finding condensation and looking at how we improve that situation. So, you know, there are other drivers that drive, you know, people wanting to change and upgrade facades like code compliance changes, for example, with ACP and fire performance. And some clients who just need to modernize.

in order to keep their buildings fresh and want to kind of keep their revenue up. But if you don't manage a facade, if you don't maintain a facade, there is an inevitability associated with its deterioration. And it's not something that we can escape. Materials will degrade and will fail and the facade performs with it, of course. Right. Because we do experience that as well on like newly built buildings, right? Those which have been rushed. And I think, yes, that's a very...

critical issue in making sure that water and air, well actually in the first place air tightness is really underestimated in this region because humidity is your biggest avenue at the moment. So in terms of, you know, again, designing all of that and having heard about your background and the issue of material in a facade system, what do you think is the most critical problem or the most critical item?

in all of these materials and what is actually the problem other than what you've just said that it's, you know, silicone joints or gaskets will stop performing. Well, look, Cézanne -Rother, I have to say you're the superior designer here. And I know that you know your way around, you know, facade designs far better than I would. But over my career, I've been more of an evaluator than a designer, but I have probably evaluated, particularly when I was testing.

well over a thousand facades. I think when I left the testing industry, I was something at something like 1200 facades that I've seen. And I think it's important to look at two different, significantly different types of facade. And I'll come on again, if you'll indulge me to explain why that's so important. So in the facade industry, again, as you know better than I do Susanna, we really have two different types of facade system. We have stick systems.

in the first place, and we have unitized systems in the second place. So let me just give you a kind of elevator pitch of what those are. So a stick system is where you build the framing onto the structure of the building, a bit like putting chopsticks on a building. And then you, whenever, when all that frame is fixed, then you come along with your glass or your panels or whatever it might be, you fill in the gaps of your frames. And then you typically either,

you fix that on with some kind of mechanical fixing, usually what we call pressure plates, which are plates that kind of go over the panel edges. And so that's how the system goes together, framing, panels, and then fixing the whole thing on. So that's a stick system. And whereas a unitized system is fundamentally different. In a unitized system, a unitized system goes together rather like Lego blocks, the children's Lego blocks. So, but we build those blocks

in a factory. So each unit has its own frame. Each unit has a piece of glass that sits in it and all of the gaskets and sealants that go into it. And it's brought to site as a, literally as a unit and it's stacked. When it's, instead of building a frame on site, you literally stack them on top of each other, literally like Lego blocks. The reason, one of the main reasons that people do this is that usually the quality control is better in a factory.

And so we can control quality better than on the site, working from a cradle in 45 degrees heat. And also it's very quick on site. So you can have, you can stock all your materials off site and then quickly bring them to site, build them. So there's a lot of advantages to a unitized system. There's a big however though, and this is again, part of one of the biggest things I want to say today. A unitized system rather like Lego,

it's very difficult to take an individual unit out if you need to. So if you've ever tried to build a Lego wall and then realize you've used the wrong color or you need to put a little window in there, you can't take a piece out from the middle. You have to progressively take it down from the top again and then build it up again. And we have that problem now with unitized systems. And why is that a problem? Well, the problem is everything that we've said before. We're now at a stage where

facades need refurbishing. And I should probably take a step back to say that a typical facade refurb life lifespan is about 20 to 25 years. There's double glazing, for example, which is one of the things you mentioned earlier on, the glass going foggy and double glazing will typically last about 20 years. Suppliers will give you a warranty for five years. If you're lucky, they'll give you a warranty for 10.

If you pay them a lot of money, they'll give you a warranty for 15, but I've never seen a 20 year warranty on a facade, not for this part of the world anyway. And so that's the type of time scale that we're looking at for getting a facade to be needing refurbishment. And the problem though, we've got plenty of buildings now in the Middle East that are that age. And just throw some numbers at you if that helps to kind of people to understand, you know, get a picture of it. We now have in just Abu Dhabi,

and Dubai alone, about 200 ,000 buildings that are about 20 to 25 years old, just in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Forget all of the other, notwithstanding all of those, Riyadh, Jeddah, Qatar, all of that kind of huge building that went on in West Bay in Qatar, all of the construction that's gone on in Riyadh and Jeddah.

I'm not talking now about the neomes and the Red Sea developments. I'm talking about buildings that have been there now for 20 years. You know, Kingdom Center, Al -Faisalaya Center in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. All of those buildings now, or a lot of those buildings are 20 years old. You know, we have literally got hundreds of thousands of buildings that are in that 20 to 25 year block. Well, if you've built those with a unitized system, what do you do? How do you take that out? You know, that's the issue. And if I might just kind of...

And, you know, the big problem really is now that we've been congratulating ourselves for many years about aren't we so good at kind of building unitized systems and we've been doing it that way. But we now have no flexibility. One of the great things about a stick system is you can disassemble it in exactly the way that you assembled it. So if your glass fails after the 20 years, whether we expect it to fail or not,

you can actually take the pressure caps off. You can take the glass out. You can change all of the gaskets and all of the sealants, and you can then put new glass in, put new sealants on, probably even use the same pressure caps. And you've essentially got a refurbished facade, provided that nothing serious has happened to your framing in that time. But you can't do that with unitized systems. A lot of unitized systems are actually what we call structurally sealed. So the glass is actually sealed in

with a structural sealant. It's actually bonded in place. It's not fixed in place. So imagine if you've got a building that's, I don't know, 50 stories tall, which we've got many of here. You know, definitely got loads of buildings that are 30 stories tall and kind of both. Again, if I could throw a number at you, in, I think it was years seven, eight and nine, Dubai built more tall buildings or certainly kept pace with the entire United States through some of those years. I think it was...

Visual Capitalist as a source that kind of came up with that information. And you can go and check out some really interesting stat on their webpage. But the amount of building that we did was huge and we used a lot of unitized facades. And now we don't have the flexibility to change them. In building in the preciseness and the precision and the quality and all of those things that are the right things to focus on,

we've unfortunately built out some of the flexibility that we absolutely need. Yeah. So with having lost the flexibility now in refurbishing Union Times facades and thinking a little bit, you know, to be future ready, future -proofing building, basically, what do you think is like really the biggest issue now? So if our meant and for of these 200 ,000 buildings you have mentioned in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

How many of these would be built with unitized and how many of these would be built with stick? And then what would be the solution to it if there is that big problem of unitized versus stick? And what can I do with the unitized facade? Well, look, the good news is that we have built some of our buildings with stick systems, but actually, yeah, particularly since the canna naughties, it's very rare to get a building with a stick system. They became

unpopular because just because of the perceived advantages of the unitized system. I have to say, it wasn't really until I've started to look backwards, back over my shoulder, at what we've done that I started to see this either. You know, we all thought we were doing the right thing, incidentally. This isn't a criticism. We've all been caught by this. But we've really got two big issues. Firstly, like I say, we built a lot of unitized facade. And don't get me wrong.

The 200 ,000 buildings that I kind of referred to, that information came from a census from Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And again, you can go look at that information online on the building census. But you have some of those are tall buildings, but some of them are villas as well. But people might say, yeah, but most of those are villas, right? And do you know what? Maybe half of them are villas, but you can't also ignore 100 ,000 villas either. So firstly, you've got a lot of unitized systems.

Secondly, even if you don't have a lot of unitized systems, you have a lot of other buildings that are still going to need refurbs. But the biggest problem again, and this is what I think we haven't really kind of joined up and I'd like to try and join up is this concept that the facade, unlike, for example, let's say, let's say you, let's say you want to change the IT, you can. Let's say you want to change the furniture and the interior design, you can. Let's say you even want to change the MEP systems in the building, you can.

all independently, but with a facade, you can't change a facade, not easily anyway, without affecting the entire rest of the building. And this isn't kind of pie in the sky thinking here. I'm literally working on buildings now where we have to, we're going to have to take all of the facade off from the top, all the way to the bottom, and then take it, do it all, do it again, all the way to the top. And look, we're working with the client to try and understand how we manage this, but this particular

building just like many other buildings. It's a mixed -use building. So it probably, you know, it's got retail in it. It's got residents in it. It's got a little bit of hotel in it. It's got, you know, so, but as soon as you take the facade off the building, then you expose the people. So people have to move out. You expose all of the interior finishes. So all of that's arguably ruined. Very, very difficult to, to, to cover that for, in some cases, up to 18 months while this happens. All your MEP.

You know, does that survive? Your IT does that? No, that definitely doesn't survive. So it's the knock -on effects of facade refurbishments, which are the biggest issue here. Your facade provides your protection. It protects you, the security, the environment, people. You simply can't take a facade off a building and expect everything in life to go on. So where do you put those people? If we have to refurbish 200 ,000 buildings,

just like I say, just in those two cities alone, well, where do you put 200 ,000 buildings worth of people whilst 200 ,000 buildings have to be refurbished? You can imagine once you start thinking about it in that kind of scale, it can be a societal problem. Is there enough, are there enough homes for people? Are there enough offices for the businesses? It can have really knock -on effects on a societal level.

It's those two things that Susanna, that are the issue. You know, the fact that we have a lot of, we have 20 to 30 years of buildings that all now are just going to start putting their hand up and saying, no, I need medical attention. You've got a lot of those buildings that are unitized and therefore very difficult to refurbish flexibly. And you have it all happening in one go, you know. So that's the issue that we need to deal with. And we haven't really been thinking about it, you see, because

Unlike other cities around the world, unlike other regions around the world, I don't know, North, South America, Europe, further East, they've all, a lot of their cities are much older. You know, they're centuries old. So they've been in this refurb cycle, have been managing this refurb cycle for centuries, literally. And in fact, if you look at some of the cities that I kind of occasionally go to, I was in Paris a few, a few months ago.

most of the building work that they're doing, like the lion's share at 90 % of the building work that they're doing is refurbs. Whereas here, 90 % of what we're doing is new build and a small amount of refurbs. And what we're gonna have to completely change our view onto is that that dynamic has to change. So we need to start firstly making people aware of this issue that...

Hey, look, you're going to have to start looking over your shoulder. You don't start planning this. There's going to be an issue. And secondly, you know, maybe, maybe stop kind of building that, the new stuff and start using what you have. You know, it's an age old, you know, sustainability. Tendent, isn't it? Use what you have before you do something new. So again, that's, that's where the nub of the problem is. And that's almost like collectively putting all of those pieces together. What the issue that we have in the GCC, we've got this unique situation.

where we don't have the experience for all these refurbs, we're going to have to do a lot of them. So we've got a lot of learning to do really quickly. And we're going to need a huge amount of resource to do it again. Imagine all the resources that we used in 30 years to build these buildings. Obviously we don't need all of that again, but we're going to need a good deal of it again, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of people and materials, expertise. Exactly. Yeah. This is what I feel is...

I don't want to say missing, but maybe lacking in the region because being from Germany, also in Germany, most of construction happening is refurbishment, but they have the support of the government. They have the knowledge built up over the years. They obviously, as you said, they're much more mature markets and they do have solutions in place when they're refurbishing like a high rise tower. They have like a temporary facade, for example, put in place, but

Obviously different climate conditions, different magnitudes of buildings and towers which were built. So what do you think from a designer's perspective, from an evaluator's perspective, from developers perspective, and then especially also from like the society and the entire industry, what do you think would be the solution to it? Or is there anything where you would want to emphasize on our audience?

we should be doing moving forward. Yes. That's again, the second crux of this, isn't it? It's okay. It's okay. It's all very well me saying, look, we've got this big problem coming everybody, but the truth is what do we try and do about it? Well, the reality is I think that we're relatively new to the problem. And as a result, I would try and kind of point people in like, we start to go start looking at it in kind of about four, four, four ways, three or four ways. The first is.

Let's think about the chat. Hundreds of thousands of buildings all about to move into that facade stage, you know, refurb stage, all at once, if you like. Well, the only thing we can do about that now is try and plan to whatever extent that we can and assessing conditions. So, yeah, I've said they're all about to go, you know, once, it won't be up to October the 1st, 2024 that everyone, everything needs doing then, but you know, there'll be, so there'll be a progression.

but there will be a significant progression over the next five to 10 years. It has to happen. As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning, you know, when we first started talking about this, age is inevitable. Materials will age. And so we have to start planning. So the first thing I would say is owners or owners committees or developers, whoever's responsible for this, we need to start assessing, assessing condition and planning.

and maybe even start building up budgets, maybe even start building up thinking about where resources would come from and start to look at time scale and cost because ultimately that's what it deals, it boils down to. You know, one answer might have been knock the building down and do it again. That might have been an answer at some point in the past, but it really isn't anymore, is it? In an international stage, we can't really say,

You know, it's just not, it's not a, it's not a sustainable or an ethical thing to do. Now we have to, we have to use what we have. And so again, particularly in that environment, we need to start planning. That's the first thing. That's the, and if you like answer to the first challenge. Now, yes, I suppose one might say that, but what about on a technological scale? You know, so we, owners and owners are not the experts on, on how to do this really from a technical perspective. So I would put the...

the onus and responsibility to some extent people are people good designers like yourself, Cezanne, people in the field like myself, but also in particular system designers. So the suppliers of facade systems, the installers of facade systems, the designers of facade systems, we need to start thinking about how we do this. You know, like I've said, a lot of these systems are structurally glazed, a lot of these unitized systems are structurally glazed.

It's long been in the industry a no -no, i .e. it's not been an option to structurally glaze on site. It's been against the advice of all of the industry. Do not structurally glaze on site. Yes, when the occasional piece of glass goes, yes, but not when you have to do 50 ,000 pieces of glass. It's just not a realistic proposition to structurally glaze on site. So we need to start thinking about different ways of doing that. I'm working on a building at the moment where what we're considering is a cassette system.

So yes, we cut out the old glass and yes, we tidy it up a little bit, but then we, the new piece of glass doesn't go in and get structurally sealed. It goes in in a frame, in a smaller frame that sits in and then is mechanically fixed. And that can be done, again, it's prepared off site, brought onto site, fixed on site. It then becomes a panelized system rather than a unitized system, almost like converting the unitized system into a panelized system. So, but we need to start.

We need to start doing that. We need to start developing the experience. We really need the help of contractors. I've long been of the belief of the position Susanna that our expertise is with our contractors. You know, we call ourselves consultants and you know, we have a responsibility to the client to design, push boundaries and all that kind of stuff. But you know, the contractors is where a lot of the expertise is. The system suppliers is where a lot of the expertise is. And we need them to start coming to the party to help us with this.

The next thing is what do we do in the future? So Susanna, if you and me are designing a building for, I don't know, let's say the Red Sea coast on Saudi, we need to start thinking less to some extent about what we're doing now and how it will work now. But also we need to start thinking about what we'll do in 25 years time when it, when it needs to be taken apart. You know, we need to start building for flexibility. Someone asked me in a conference a little while ago, you know,

what will be the shape of facades in the future? And they said in about, let's say 50 years. And look, I can remember 50 years back, but I'll tell you what I couldn't have thought about is if I remember 50 years back, what I thought about what was happening now, I couldn't have imagined the internet, I couldn't imagine mobile phones, I couldn't imagine drones and all of those kinds of things. The only thing I can promise you about 50 years from now, if God willing, we're all here in 50 years now, is that things will be different.

and we can't conceptualize what there will be in 50 years. Therefore, the best strategy would be to design for flexibility, design for changeability, design buildings that can be changed for that amazing kind of world saving device that we start to build onto our facades to save the planet. It sounds like an out of this world thing to say, but that is the way we are going. And that's what we need to start thinking about doing. Instead of...

thinking about now in the next five years, we need to start thinking about 25 years time and really, you know, keeping that in the forefront of our minds, you know, think about what we don't know. And the last thing I would say, you know, in this context is to answer the question, I suppose, when, now is the answer. We've got to start doing this now. The longer we procrastinate about it, the longer we can, we prevaricate over whether I'm kind of right about this or right about that and other people.

And it's not just me that's saying this in the industry, by the way, plenty of people across many kind of great think tanks are really kind of focusing on this now. We've got to start thinking about it now. If we don't start thinking about it now, the wave will break over our shoulders before we've even turned around. And so this is kind of the situation. So yeah, it's a big challenge and there are some big challenges there. And if we don't start talking about the challenge, planning for the challenge,

preparing for the challenge and not making the challenge worse in the next 10 to 20, 30 years. If we don't start doing that, I think we're going to have a problem. But we've got, so we've got to start. That's my message. Start, let's start thinking about these issues. Thank you so much, Andy, for those insights. And yes, the sooner we start the better, because your point in saying that, you know, there will be an issue and in 50 years, we can't even predict what's going to happen or where we can predict it or we can assume, but we wouldn't be able to.

predict how our buildings are reacting to that. Right. And another statement of what you said is like to start now or to start that awareness and to educate the people about the importance of it, because we all know, I mean, how many times are we spending indoors? How much fossil fuels are we burning in cooling and heating our buildings? Right. So it will become, I think, a pretty

big issue and it is already an issue, but it was becoming bigger and bigger if we don't start now. Thanks very much for allowing me the platform. It's been a pleasure talking to you as always Susanna and I'm looking to you now to save the world. Thank you very much Andy for being our guest, for raising the awareness and for once again setting the standards and being like the

pioneer in the Middle East in doing a change. To our audience, thank you so much for listening in all the way through. If you have any comments for us on today's episode, it would be great to hear from you. We would love to have you tuned in to our next episode and stay tuned for the next