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Inhabit opens 2 new offices

News

Inhabit is delighted to announce the opening of our latest China based office in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, complementing the existing offices located in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The office will be managed by Mr Peter Luo, who has been working within our Beijing team for the past 12 months servicing this region remotely. This new location will allow Inhabit to provide on the ground local support to all our existing and new projects. With Chengdu and Chongqing being active growing markets, Inhabit will be able to provide a more supportive, hands-on service to our clients.

In addition to the new Chengdu office that opened in September, Inhabit is also pleased to announce commencement of operations in Brisbane, Australia this week.

Tony Alvaro, Executive Director, Australasia on the establishment of Inhabit Brisbane:

“Brisbane is the consolidation of our local presence for a number of projects that both Melbourne & Sydney have been focused upon over the past 18 months. Our office is being established by newly appointed Associate, Ryan Hannam. Ryan has valuable experience, having worked in both the Sydney & Hong Kong offices of Inhabit over the past 2 years. We’re excited at the expertise Ryan brings to the Brisbane market and the opportunities he will deliver to our clients.”

Chengdu Enquiries, please contact Mr Peter Luo
Address: Room 2603-45, Tower A, Times Square, No.2, Zongfu Street, Jinjiang District, Chengdu, PRC, 610016
T. +86 28 6684 1322 or email peter.luo@inhabitgroup.cn

Brisbane Enquiries, please contact Mr Ryan Hannam
Address: 58 Hope Street, South Brisbane, QLD, 4101
T: +61 7 3606 1201 or email ryan.hannam@inhabitgroup.com

About: Inhabit is an innovative consulting group exclusively focused on providing specialist engineering services. We complement traditional engineers and architects and deliver technical input to improve the quality and efficiency of today’s buildings. At Inhabit we aim to deliver fully coordinated services incorporating both local constraints and world best practices, in what we believe is the most effective way possible.

For further enquiries, please visit http://www.inhabitgroup.com

 

 

Inhabit Launches InEnergy™

InEnergy, Integrated Solutions, News

Commercial application of Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD) input in the early stages of design requires it to be rapid, flexible and accurate. Concept design is an iterative process that relies on quick assessments of various options. Changes in recent years by the Building Code of Australia (BCA) Deemed-to-Satisfy requirements, which are conservative and inflexible, have added complexity to the design process. The ability to conduct option studies early during the concept design process has been limited to slow and costly full energy modelling packages.

To address this problem of high cost, slow, full energy modelling early in the concept design process, Inhabit has invested 2 years of R&D to develop InEnergy™, a program for rapid, accurate energy assessments for BCA and Greenstar. The program averages energy demands on a monthly basis for each zone of a building, which is far quicker than the more traditional EQUEST or IES modelling processes which takes hourly averaging over each square metre of each floor.

InEnergy™ has a sophisticated set of parameters that allows Inhabit to model the energy performance of a building in a day, rather than taking a week, for a package such as EQUEST or IES. Architectural schemes can be modelled for compliance with BCA Section J, an estimation of Greenstar ENE-1 Energy points can be carried out, and the total energy load of the building can be determined. Using InEnergy™ early in the concept design stage saves both time and money, on a full energy modelling process and provides a framework for better defined project outcomes.

For further information about InEnergy™, contact Darren O’Dea or Samantha Anderson to arrange an inhouse presentation and workshop.

Download an Overview:
InEnergy – Removing the Section J Headache! – Australia – August2012 – Final (PDF, 322kB)

Darren O’Dea (Inhabit Melbourne)
Tel: +61 (0) 414 868 058
darren.odea@inhabitgroup.com

Samantha Anderson (Inhabit Sydney)
Tel:+61 (0) 402 632 744
samantha.anderson@inhabitgroup.com

Global Walls of China

News

As a civilisation and culture, China’s rich heritage of engineering and construction spans millennia. Construction of the Great Wall of China began over 2,000 years ago during the Qin Dynasty. When the wall was completed during the Ming Dynasty it was over 6,000km long. Chinese companies have maintained this industriousness and passion for building walls. Their ingenuity and knowledge is being applied to building curtain walls, glass and cladding for offices, apartment blocks, hospitals, airports, universities, shopping malls…all around the world.

The global growth of Chinese curtain wall companies has been rapid and largely uncontrolled. Quality and price vary significantly and it is not uncommon for there to be a cost difference of over 100% between Chinese domestic products and international export quality products.

The international construction industry is faced with the challenge of navigating the massively expanding Chinese market to find quality materials at competitive prices. Globalization of supply has increased risks as builders are now confronted with a range of questions:

  • How do we know if we are getting international quality materials?
  • Is the design going to work?
  • Has there been a substitution of specified high quality materials for lesser quality ones?
  • Are there going to be problems with warranties and follow up from the supplier?

These and other questions now combine to create a high level of uncertainty and one of the largest risks facing the recently globalized construction industry.

China Global Walls - Bruce Wymond

Fig 1: Façade quality control activities carried out by the Inhabit Team in China

Inhabit assists in the specification of materials, pre-qualification assessments of suppliers, and production quality control (for more details refer to Fig 1). Our offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, are consulting on some of China’s largest buildings. We are also providing specialist façade production quality control services on a range of international projects.

Author: Bruce Wymond, Managing Director, Inhabit Group.

For more information in relation to Inhabit’s integrated approach to co-ordinating the quality control process of products in the logistics supply chain of large scale commercial projects, please contact:

Australia – Bruce Wymond
Tel: +61 488 126 222
bruce.wymond@inhabitgroup.com

Europe/UK – William MacDonald 
Tel: +44 (0)20 3397 2484 
will.macdonald@inhabitgroup.com