Author: Dr. Eke, Felix Chima
Increased demands on the built environment requires continued and enhanced research and
development activities Building System Technology. Traditional building technology canbe
considered to be well developed. Nevertheless society continues to demand improved
competitiveness, customer and user satisfaction, sustainability, quality and safety of the built
environment. Global warming is a serious problem facing the world today. In order to stop or
reverse this problem, the construction industry most change from the traditional method of
building to the green building concepts. Making building green will greatly impact this
problem. There are many ways for this to be done. This study pointed out some aspects that
constitute building technology practices in the building industry in the recent time. The study
further reveals the impact of building technology and updates the knowledge and skill of
building practitioners, thereby enhancing the National Economic Empowerment Development
Strategy (NEEDS).
Keywords:Building system, technology, national empowerment and developmentstrategy.
Introduction
The building industry represents one of the largest, and most important, enterprises in
the world. For fast-growing economies in the world, there is a growing demand for practical,
sustainable building designs that will provide a higher standard of living with minimal
resources demand. Many of these problems are being met by innovations in building
technology. These innovations, for example, apply recent advances in the fields of materials,
manufacturing and thermos sciences to the construction of new buildings, to the retrofit or
rehabilitation of exiting buildings and to the efficient operation of buildings(Elattar, 2009).
Since the large demand has been placed on building material industry, especially in the
last decade owing to the increasing population, which causes a chronic shortage of building
materials, the architects and civil engineers have been challenged to disorder useful building
and construction materials. The increase in the popularity of using environmental friendly, low
cost and lightweight construction materials in building industry has brought about the need to
investigate how this can be achieved by benefiting the environment as well as maintain the
materialrequirement affirmed in the standards(Elattar, 2009).
New developments are made everyday in the field of engineering that are meant to save
energy and protect the environment. This is a very important time to be conscious of energy
consumption, due to global warming. Naturally there will be experts constantly creating new
technologiesin thisfield. While green building construction may appear costly for consumers,
new developmentsin the engineering field are providing increasingly cost-effective solutions.
Even though green engineering is coming to the forefront ofsociety now, it has been around and
developing formany years.
About the author: Dr. Eke, Felix Chima , Department of Building Technology, Federal College of Education (Technical), Omoku,
Rivers StateNigeria.