Publications

Sustainable construction development is a recent term that is required to create an eco-friendly built environment using renewable and recyclable resources and to reduce energy consumption and waste within protecting the natural environment. This term means such an improvement that pleases the current requirements without limitation of the prospect of sustaining requirements in future. Many problems face builders while executing projects, especially these projects were decided to be built over difficult topographies, such as rivers, falls, inclinations, caves, ridges, cliffs, and mountains. Construction challenges to build a project over a difficult topography are diverse starting by executing piles, retaining walls, conserving stability, and choosing the proper sustainable materials that can withstand the natural environmental factors. This paper sheds the light on the potential of any site's certain criteria; mostly its topography and slope on the provision of sustainable and ecological buildings. It seeks to recognize the sustainable and ecological variables of site topography, consuming a set of characteristics for each building type. The main aim of this research is to propose guidelines of sustainable construction methods that can be used to enable builders to build over difficult topographies, particularly on mountains. The research therefore depended on a scientific methodology through analyzing a sort of literature sources to structure a theoretical base, and then certain parameters were concluded. These parameters were used to analyze a concentrated case study on a site attaching (Beaufort Castle-Chkif), located in Arnoun South of Lebanon. Data of this field-work was conducted by site-visits, capturing photos, interviews, and questionnaire. This site is envisioned to be tested for building projects over sloped contour lines of Chkif Mountain. The paper provides an application for the development of the guidelines for passive and sustainable capability on favorite orientations on the buildings in difficult sloped areas with respect to the climatic local data, Application of the idea of the sustainable and ecological development in the building construction will be an origin of engineering and scientific inspiration for many coming years. One of the conclusion points is the preferable typology of projects to be built over mountains is touristic and entertainment activity to attract people. The sloped contour lines may be employed to be a potential not threat.