To all Al-Mutlaa residents, Be careful (7).

I wasn’t surprised that many citizens contacted me to share stories about the trap of parking ramps I described in one of my previous articles in this series. I received many comments from our dear readers who agreed with what I wrote about and they shared stories about how they suffer daily with parking around their homes. Unfortunately, this nightmare will only end if you demolish the house and build it again, but believe me, even if you and hire the best engineers to redesign your home he will most likely make the very same mistakes. To be honest, I still don’t understand why this is such a problem for engineering offices. Simply increasing the width of the basement entrance or car park by just 50cm won’t affect all the interior space of the house. This isn’t only a problem in villas, but even in many apartment buildings with basement parking you might find that the number and size of columns crowding the basement make it impossible to maneuver in a car. Then the basement becomes useless. The problem extends even to commercial complexes or malls. I’ll give you an example of a project that I personally supervised. I was very particular about the width of the parking spaces as well as the size and number of the ramps; that there should be two entrances and two exits to the basement car park even though the municipality requires no more than one entrance, two exits, and a width of 2.5 m for the parking spaces. I even asked the consultant, one of the biggest engineering offices in Kuwait, to submit for my approval a full study on the parking for this project because I knew the neighborhood where this project was located and my personal experience with the traffic in that area gave me better insight on this issue than any foreign engineers. So, once we broke ground on the project and the concrete was poured for the first basement, I noticed something was wrong. I called over the project engineer and pointed out that an entire ramp was missing. He insisted that wasn’t possible, so we went back to look at the drawings so I could show him there should be another entrance ramp. Here we discovered that after we discussed this project and the plan for the parking with the architects, the project was handed over to the engineers to draft the layouts and submit them to the municipality for the necessary licenses. But those engineers, regardless of what was agreed with the architects, took a copy/paste approach and submitted drawings which were in line with only the minimum requirements of the municipality. Normally I would review all the structural, electrical, plumbing, and HVAC layouts to make sure for myself that they all fit together. But this time I didn’t expect that a reputable international engineering firm would make such a mistake. After the project was finished, I patched it up as much as possible and turned the entrance at the back to an exit and the exit, which was originally in the front, became the new entrance. So, the issue was fixed but it was still an annoying reminder every time I enter this mall that the mistake should never have been made in the first place. There is no need to talk about all the other malls and buildings in Kuwait. I don’t think you will find one person, citizen or expat, driven into the curb of a poorly designed turn or ramp. All we can do is complain to God about those who design such parking lots. Back to the structure and designs of a building, which I don’t think the average citizen would think about or be familiar with, so I’ll explain it simply for anyone who hasn’t had to build anything before. The design can be divided into three sections. The first is the architectural section with the layout of the rooms and the facade. An architect isn’t necessarily going to be an engineer because in many universities the architecture program is considered part of the school of fine arts. A civil or structural engineer, on the other hand, does study within the school of engineering. Any project needs the first architectural section from an architect, the second structural section from a structural or civil engineer, and the third electro-mechanical designs from a mechanical engineer which would include electrical, air conditioning, and plumbing. So, any good building project is a mix of art and engineering. The architect is always of broad imagination and will add whatever decoration and aesthetic details he can. The structural and mechanical engineers, on the other hand, are the ones who turn imagination and art into an executable plan. Some of them usually have no desire to create any artistic and they push the project to become square and flat, creating a forest of columns because it makes the job easier for them. I want to introduce these ideas because of its importance to the citizens, but I will explain more in the next article and give specific examples to offer advice to the citizen who is new to construction projects.

Stay safe.