Watch 2 minute video to listen Sawsan talking about her background and passions, which led her to take part in Construct Innovate Work Ready Graduate Programme.
Read the corresponding extract below.
Sawsan’s background
Sawsan Bassalat was born and raised in Palestine, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering, and where she worked for Birzeit University in Palestine for three years as a teaching and research assistant. During this time of learning, studying and teaching architecture, Sawsan understood architecture to be a multifaceted discipline: how it can innovated, the various technologies that can be employed to execute it, and also, the social justice aspect of it. For that reason, she pursued, a Master’s degree in Architecture, Urbanism and Climate Action at University College Dublin with the Ireland-Palestine Scholarship Programme and it’s part of the Ireland Fellows Programme. That brought a whole new aspect to architecture for Sawsan.
Sawsan later pursued, an internship and worked as a research scientist, in Ireland, during which she worked on life cycle assessments (LCAs) and on post-occupancy evaluations.
Watch 1 minute video to listen Sawsan talking about the two projects she has been involved in at Scott Tallon Walker WRGP placement.
Read the corresponding extract below.
Examples of work and projects Sawsan has been involved in during her WRGP
Sawsan has been involved in two main projects at Scott Tallon Walker.
The first project is on-site and it is a hospice building, that is being constructed right now: “I came in, during the construction phase. And just learning how to navigate that multi-disciplinary, multi-team environment, working with the contractors, the engineers and also ourselves as the architects and just how much you can make a difference in small scale. So even though the building has been designed, a lot of things arise during construction and on site and just trying to put, sustainable thinking into those solutions and trying to select more environmentally friendly products, for example, detailing for thermal bridging, just a little touch of sustainable thinking here and there really does make a difference.”
The other project that Sawsan is working on is a decarbonisation pilot Pathfinder:
“It is a project with the HSE, on three different campuses, in the West of Ireland. Each of those healthcare facilities has its own intricacies and its own special circumstances that you need to work with. The biggest one we are working with is at Sligo University Hospital with multiple buildings built in different time periods.
We are working on the retrofit of each specific, live and ongoing case, because you can’t stop the whole operational hospital to be retrofitted. At the same time, you still need to enhance the performance and work with the services engineers and the structural engineers, include and adjust costs… So it is really a pathfinder, and it’s a pilot project.”
