Suggested Guidelines for Integrating Maintenance Considerations into the Life Cycle of the Building

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University

Abstract

Maintenance of buildings is a crucial process that has a great impact on both buildings'
performance and the efficiency of their embedded systems. However, the building maintenance
industry in Egypt has long been an area of neglect, as most of buildings stakeholders restrict its role
to the operation phase of the building. This attitude disregards the precautionary maintenance
processes that could be achieved through the preliminary phases of the buildings. The main concern
of this paper is suggesting specific guidelines that enable the integration of maintenance
considerations into the whole life cycle of the buildings. The ultimate purpose is to achieve better
performing buildings regarding maintenance aspects. The study sheds light on the major barriers of
applying efficient maintenance, through the analysis of results extracted from focused interviews
that targeted a number of general and maintenance managers in a number of selected buildings.
Emphasis is made on the role and impact of maintenance considerations in guiding the decision￾making process, as well as the lack of integrating maintenance into the whole building design
process. This paper ends up with suggesting a framework that demonstrates the impact of integrating
considerations of maintenance throughout the whole life cycle of the building.

Keywords