Green Building Matter with Hamoda Youssef

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Part of the Qatar Green Building Council,</span> <strong>Hamoda Youssef</strong> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">is also a member of the USGBC. An architect by heart, his journey in sustainable building started upon pursuing a European education. Now a proud member (and leader) of the LEED movement in his region, Hamoda shares with us how sustainability has become an integral part of his career.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sustainability in Education and Career</span></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hamoda grew up in Cairo, Egypt, where he studied architectural engineering at Cairo University. His early career was spent as an interior design architect before he moved to an architectural engineering multidisciplinary consultancy firm.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Somewhere down the road he took up environmental planning for his graduate studies in Italy, which exposed him to the (USGBC’s) LEED movement through an internship. This is when it became clear that sustainability was a path that he could take, when back in college it was mostly a concept attached to loads of coursework.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">LEED Held The Answers</span></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Earlier in his career, Hamoda met a lot of people who advocated for sustainable building which allowed him to see how groundbreaking the LEED movement was for the built environment. Before LEED, there was no framework to validate sustainability designs. There was no way to convert designs into actual, usable (and recognized) products in the marketplace.</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It’s not about technology advancement but how smartly [we] combine things and integrate them together from a multidisciplinary approach to enhance our overall design and products.” - Hamoda Youssef</span></em></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">LEED gave the answers. There was no skyrocketing upgrade of technology involved, but a genius unders