When engineer Khoshhal Azeemi returned to his birthplace of Kabul to start work on the ACOMET Family Hospital in 2004, he found a city ravaged by war, without a functioning infrastructure or even basic amenities.
Azeemi had left Afghanistan to study at the Military Engineering University in St Petersburg and then Imperial College London before joining engineering company Ramboll Whitbybird in 2001. During this time, he joined NCLC, a training organisation run by Afghan doctors based in London, which had formed a steering group to help bring Afghan healthcare up to UK standards.
When NCLC proposed building the ACOMET Family Hospital, which it hoped would become a model for the future of Afghanistan’s healthcare system, Azeemi offered to design it. ‘I had a strong desire to make a contribution to the reconstruction of my country,’ he says. ‘When this opportunity came up I knew this was my chance.’
On his first site visit in 2004, Azeemi worked out construction costs and assessed the demand for medical services and, realizing that the project needed to be bigger than first conceived, proposed two buildings: one for training and one for treatment, including diagnostic, outpatient and operating facilities. He then had to negotiate with the Afghan government to secure more land. In 2005, Azeemi took a sabbatical from Ramboll Whitbybird to work as the main contractor on the project.
Kahbul is in a seismic zone so Azeemi developed a rectangular building plan with a resilient, symmetrical structure and all heavy loads located at lower levels to minimize earthquake damage. To keep costs down and minimise environmental damage, recycled materials were used wherever possible. Natural ventilation has been maximised and thermal energy from the surrounding ground is used to regulate temperature.
Since opening in 2007 the hospital has been recognised as a centre of excellence within the Afghan health system.
Kabul may be more stable than much of Afghanistan, but it is still a dangerous and difficult place to work. ‘It is one of few capital cities in the world that does not have an engineered and planned sewage system,’ says Azeemi.
‘The road conditions are pretty bad and can barely cope with the volume of traffic, and the supply of water and electricity is very unreliable and insufficient.’
A dearth of quality building materials meant that cement had to be brought in from Pakistan and Russia. ‘After almost three decades of war, there is hardly any construction industry in the country,’ says Azeemi; security issues at the Afghan borders routinely delayed supplies of key materials.
Recruiting skilled tradesmen was not as simple as putting ad in the paper: ‘I visited construction sites around the city to see the workmanship of different trades people [and] invited them to work on my project,’ he says.
Despite a lack of materials, a tight budget, squatters on site and corrupt local officials, Azeemi describes the project as ‘the most challenging and rewarding experience’.
‘I worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week and had almost no other engineers to rely on or consult with,’ he says. For Azeemi it was ‘ideal’: ‘We had very limited budget and very little time to deliver the project, so having to make all the decisions myself reduced coordination time and ensured that the proposed solutions were viable.’
In 2008 Azeemi’s work on the hospital was recognised by the Institution of Civil Engineers, which awarded him its International Medal in recognition of an outstanding contribution to a civil engineering project outside the UK.
So did winning the award send a message to the building industry? ‘There is a lot of work to be done in Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, and I think the award brings attention to the fact that such projects can be successfully delivered against the odds,’ says Azeemi.
Since finishing the project, Azeemi has helped set up a Ramboll Whitbybird office in Kazakhstan, combining Western engineering expertise and design services with experience and knowledge of local design procedures. ‘We are working on a number of large projects in the region, bridging UK design teams with local design practices,’ he says.
Projects like this show that dedicated people such as Azeemi can make a huge difference in a country that desperately needs the skills of good designers, builders, architects and engineers from all over the world.
