Congratulations to our international team, who have been awarded the HSE Project of the Year for the House of Wisdom project in Sharjah.
McLaren Construction UAE recently completed and handed over Sharjah’s new House of Wisdom project, an iconic library and cultural centre situated near to Sharjah’s international airport and built on behalf of Shurooq, Sharjah’s investment and development authority.
More about the project
Designed by Foster & Partners, The House of Wisdom is an iconic library and cultural centre situated near to Sharjah’s international airport. Our team worked closely together to overcome engineering challenges and programme pressure while implementing additional precautions to protect people from COVID-19.
The House of Wisdom team had zero lost time injuries overall and zero injuries in 2020, resulting in over two million safe on site working hours.
Working directly for the head of Shurooq, Mr Marwan Jassim Al Sarkal, who had a very personal interest in this high-profile project for the Emirate of Sharjah, our team overcame challenges right through from the initial discussions on the tender process, through to the final handover of the project to achieve successful and timely delivery of this amazing project.
Foster and Partners, who are famous for quality architecture and complex iconic buildings were the lead designer and heading the design team and acting as Engineer for the project, working with Aurecon on the structural and MEP and Arcadis where the PMC.
Health & Safety
Getting mandatory levels of Health and Safety performance from local partners in Sharjah can be a real challenge, but they welcomed our approach and we worked closely with them to teach them how to look after their operatives and improve their processes, which in their own admittance improved efficiency on the project and actually improved the moral of their workforce, which was a pleasure to see.
With between 600 and 800 people on site at any one time in a very congested area with the building at all different levels, our team performed incredibly to achieve over 2 Million working hours with no LTI or injury to any of our workforce or that of the supply chain.
Third party inspectors visited for other reasons and witnessed the highest standards of safety and also quality they have seen to date in Sharjah and informed our team we are going ‘’way above and beyond what they have seen previously and it is a testament to our team and ethos’’.
Our nomination focused on our open and transparent approach, complex and lengthy value engineering to bring the project in line with the budget, delivering the highest standards of construction safety seen in Sharjah for many years and as importantly, we finished on time.
We also cannot forget the massive challenge of Covid, border and travel restrictions, material supply issues and we ensured safe delivery for all staff, labour and supply chain utilising our extensive Covid -19 Management Plan, which again was highly commended by senior executives visiting the site on a regular basis.
