Wellbeing in buildings — a rewarding process? Between wishful thinking and reality

Author's Biography

Farah Naz CEng FCIBSE, WELL and LEED AP, has over 15 years’ experience in the construction sector. She has worked in the UK and other European countries, and in the US. For the past four years she has been based in the UAE with BuroHappold Engineering, where she has been steering the sustainability practice covering the entire AIME region. In her innovating role she mainly targets resource-efficient building-level and city-level urban planning and the implementation of best practices regarding health, liveability, wellbeing, biomimetics and city resilience agendas that will build the foundation of future Middle Eastern smart cities and communities. As a technical professional, Farah also evaluates buildings’ energy performance within projects in the UK and other European countries. Farah was a prime mover in creating the strategy for the first zero-energy building in the UK, which subsequently won the 2015 RIBA Sustainable Buildings Award. In the Middle East her name has become synonymous with implementable sustainability — among others, linked to projects including Museum of the Future, the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, the Bee’ah headquarters in Sharjah, Masdar master planning and the sustainability pavilion for EXPO 2020 in Dubai. Farah holds a BSc in architectural engineering from the North American Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT) and a Master’s in sustainable environmental design from the Architectural Association (AA), School of Architecture in London. She is WELL AP and LEED AP certified and registered with the UK Engineering Council as a Chartered Engineer. She is a board member of the Emirates Green Building Council, CIBSE UAE chapter, member of the Tau Alpha Pi Honor Society and of CIBSE UK Resilient Cities Group, and associate member of the American Institute of Architects.

Eleonora Panciera grew up in an environment that stimulated her sense for modern and sustainable architecture in which technological, social and cultural vectors converge. After her studies of modern languages and literature in Italy and of marketing and economics at the Steinbeis University in Berlin, Eleonora’s professional focus has been strategic marketing and business development, supporting mid-size and larger organisations to fulfill the necessary criteria to achieve change in their competitive set. Leading major international change management, process improvement and digital transformation projects has been her core business for the past 10 years. Eleonora worked, among others, for BuroHappold Engineering, the fashion brand MCM, Bain & Company, Rubicon Partners Industrial Investors, Sun Microsystems, Kaspersky Lab and Publicis Groupe.