Editorial

Citation

Shelbourn, M. (2009), "Editorial", Structural Survey, Vol. 27 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2009.11027baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Structural Survey, Volume 27, Issue 2

It is with great pleasure that I sit here on the Eurostar writing my first editorial for the Structural Survey journal. I have been a friend and colleague of my joint editor Mike Hoxley for over ten years now and I was more than happy to accept the offer of becoming the joint editor of this journal. I think that is only prudent for me to perhaps formally introduce myself and provide readers with a little more detail of my background than Mike gave in the editorial of the previous issue of the journal.

Having completed an Ordinary National Diploma in Construction from my local further education college in Grantham I applied to a number if institutions to begin the seven-year slog of becoming an architect. Not having the natural flair required I took a year out and weighed up my options – finally deciding on a Building Surveying degree from Sheffield Hallam. Graduating during the last recession in the mid 1990s it proved difficult for me to gain employment. Much pondering led to the decision to undertake a Masters course in Information Technology in Property and Construction at Salford University.

Here I met perhaps the most influential mentors of my academic career, Professor Ghassan Aouad and Mike Hoxley. My Masters proved a success and subconsciously I think I had caught the academic bug because I agreed to undertake a PhD in Computer-Aided-Learning in Building Pathology – with Ghassan and Mike providing the supervision. Although during the studies Mike decided to move institutions we remained great friends and have been reunited at Nottingham Trent University.

Upon successful completion of the PhD I joined the team at Construct-IT at Salford where my research career began. Working on a number of EU funded projects at Salford and more when I joined Loughborough University I was able to travel widely within Europe meeting colleagues and making new research contacts along the way. My research has not solely focused on the construction sector. I am part of a consortium that has secured funding to investigate the use of ICT with older people, with my specialism being the learning and support needs. The funding has come from the “New dynamics of ageing programme” which is funded by all five main research councils. The reason I am travelling on Eurostar as I write this, in order to investigate further funding for this project.

As part of my duties within NTU I am charged with teaching tomorrows’ surveyors building technology and the complexities of understanding how our buildings are put together.

I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank Mike for inviting me onto the journal team and I look forward to working with them all. Now enough about me … what do we have in this issue?

In this issue there are five papers providing insight into: the complexities of bills of quantities; evacuation and rescue in high rise buildings; archaeological building analysis; flexibility in buildings; and sustainable refurbishment. The paper from Peter Davis and colleagues examines the role that Bills of Quantities serve and how effective they are as a pre-contract and post-contract tool in the age of using computer-aided drawings and associated software that directly generates quantities from them, with some interesting results being presented. Mohammad Hassanain provides a paper on the challenges faced by occupants and firefighters during evacuation and rescue operations in high-rise buildings. A number of risk factors and issues to consider, for occupants escaping, and firefighters entering, a high-rise building, have been described from the literature available.

Building palaeopathology – a new term for me – is described by Michael Heaton in his paper. The paper demonstrates to construction professionals the client benefits of archaeological building analysis, and how client interests are rarely represented when they wish to modify Listed or historic buildings. Our next paper by Niklas Israelsson and Bengt Hansson from Sweden discusses the factors that influence flexibility in buildings. The paper conducts a survey into adaptability of buildings. The relevant factors are placed in order of importance to provide decision-makers with a balanced and deliberate approach to this important subject. This issue concludes with a thought provoking paper from John Mansfield on the subject of sustainable refurbishment. The paper has three clear aims centred on the issues of international policy for sustainability in the built environment; how legacy stock has an influence on this policy; and to review the UK Government’s direct and indirect support of sustainable refurbishment.

Finally I finish with a thank-you to all the authors that have submitted papers to the journal and I hope to read many more contributions from them in the future.

Mark Shelbourn