Week of 5 December
1. Progress on the Mohammed VI Tower project (Morocco)
This week, our Chairman Johan Beerlandt visited the Mohammed VI Tower project site in Rabat (Morocco) to witness progress of works. This was an opportunity for him to thank the teams and to encourage them for the next key milestones. It was also an opportunity to meet with the Client, Mr Othman Benjelloun, who expressed his satisfaction about the evolution of the project.
The work at the moment is concentrated on the base of the tower: glazing of the façade, installation of false ceilings, installation of hydraulic networks, etc.
As a reminder, this 250-metre tower is composed of 55 floors that will house offices, flats, a hotel and shops. The building was designed by the architects Rafael de la Hoz and Hakim Benjelloun, and features high environmental quality with LEED Gold and HQE certifications, a particularly fine aesthetic and a range of innovations developed in particular by our BESIX Engineering department and the Façades team.
2. New ‘Onument’ for victims of Covid in Aarschot (Belgium)
On Saturday 3 December an ‘onument’ was inaugurated in the city of Aarschot (Belgium), in remembrance of Covid victims. BESIX Infra installed this monument on behalf of Bas Smets, the landscape architect who designed the memorial.
The particularity of this project is that BESIX Infra used ironstone for it, which is a material often used in historical buildings in this region. BESIX Infra extracted it during road works in Diest, a city nearby, in 2019, a few months before the Covid pandemic was declared in Belgium.
The corona pandemic caused a broad wave of loss and challenges to our society. The symbolic onuments are being placed all over Belgium to create a place where we can feel connection, belonging and comfort. The neologism ‘Onuments’ came about after an idea by Uus Knops, a Flemish artist, Bas Smets and a few other representatives of the Flemish artistic scene. It was created to name lighter, airier and less massive structures than monuments, with the symbolic and crucial initial letter O.
3. Spread the lean methodology
Loïc de Terwangne, Lean Engineer, and Moncef Berraj, Junior Lean & Planning Engineer, two colleagues from BESIX Engineering, recently presented the Lean Construction concept to the 2nd Master Construction students of ECAM Brussels Engineering School, and more specifically the Last Planner® System (LPS), the most commonly used tool in our sector and thus widely applied at BESIX. Congrats to Loïc and Moncef for spreading the word!
More and more BESIX teams are implementing Lean planning on their sites, which promotes communication and collaboration between all parties involved in a project. Site teams using Lean are seeing subcontractors, workers and people in charge take on more responsibility, leading to greater trust, less waste and more efficient cost management.
Are you too interested in getting started with Lean? It’s possible! The Engineering department has a team devoted to developing specific working methods to optimise construction site processes. Don’t hesitate, as a project team, to contact BESIX Engineering!
4. Hacking Digital Renovation! (Belgium)
From 1 to 3 December, the third edition of the Hacking Digital Renovation hackathon took place in Brussels. Experienced and young talents from the construction and tech world worked together in teams to imagine the future of the renovation market backed by digital tools.
The teams had to pitch their projects in front of a jury on Saturday noon. Our colleague Mira Hoevenaghel, Manager Sustainable Construction at BESIX, was part of the jury: “Participants presented impressive and innovative solutions from very different angles. Each project tackled a real problem the construction sector is currently facing, linking sustainability (circular economy, carbon footprint, equipment) with digitalisation (artificial intelligence, data platforms, Building Information Modeling).”
Hacking Digital Renovation is an initiative by several actors in the construction sector, among which Embuild, the Belgian construction confederation.
And then this...
Would you like to know what inspires colleague Marie-José Knape, Environment Manager at BESIX Nederland, in her daily work? Then watch this video:
(Direction : Dutch Visuals, on behalf of BESIX Nederland)