Method & Philosophy
You are where you live
Every serious argument in this industry eventually reduces to that. The quality of a home, its cost, how long it took and whether it existed at all — these are not construction questions. They are the terms on which people live. ABD has worked in Dubai for two decades, first as a design practice and now as an advisory.
The change is not a rebrand. It is what happens when three people conclude that the decisions that most affect a building are made a long way upstream of the drawings, and that almost nobody is advising well at that point.
Why an Advisory, and Why These Three
Sanjay Manchanda ran one of the largest master developers in the region for ten years.
Andrew J Bannister has spent nearly forty years designing and building, and the last of them studying why the world cannot house itself.
Abdulla Alawadhi has spent his career in the UAE Government institutions.
None of us does the others' job. That is deliberate, and it is the reason clients come. A developer facing a market entry does not have a structural question, a construction question and a political question — they have one question with three faces, and they are usually forced to ask it of three separate firms who do not speak to one another.
We are three principals in one room. Small, senior, and selective by design.
On Method
We have a position on how construction should change, and we do not hide it. Construction is the last great industry that has not industrialised. It builds the same way it built a century ago, one project at a time, relearning the same lessons on every site.
The route out is not a better product — the market is full of excellent products that changed nothing. It is a central point of control: one place where design, manufacture, supply and delivery are decided together, and through which the data actually flows.
That conviction sits behind GUILD of MMC, the non-profit platform Andrew founded to advance modern methods of construction for affordable and social housing. It also shapes the advice we give here — including the advice, given regularly, that a particular scheme should not industrialise at all.