nZEB Expo 2026: The Integrated Design and Build Process
Building a house is a far more complex process than it may seem at first glance. Dozens of specialists are involved in bringing a project to life: architects, engineers, designers, suppliers, and construction teams. In most cases, the client is the one who has to manage all these relationships, without always having the necessary knowledge to assess technical decisions or understand their impact on costs and construction timelines.
At nZEB Expo 2026, Cătălin Caraza began his presentation with a simple question: how many people are actually involved in building a house? The answer, more than 100, says a lot about the complexity of such a project. With so many people and areas of expertise involved, the success of a construction project depends not only on the quality of each individual stage, but especially on how well those stages work together.
This is where the idea of Design & Build comes in. It is not simply an organisational model or a type of contract, but an approach in which design and construction are treated as parts of the same process. When teams collaborate from the earliest stages of a project, decisions are better informed, and the proposed solutions can be implemented without compromises during construction.
In the presentation below, Cătălin Caraza explains how this philosophy took shape over time and why it has become one of the principles underlying the projects developed by Inginerie Creativă.
The Design & Build approach did not emerge from a desire to simplify the process, but from experience gained through projects in which design and construction were treated as a whole.
An important milestone was participation in the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe, where Cătălin Caraza, Marius Șoflete, and Octavian Timu were part of the team that represented Romania with the Prispa House project. Together with approximately 40 students, they designed and built an energy-efficient home, achieving second place in the energy efficiency category, fourth place in comfort, and ninth place in the overall ranking.
More important than the competition results, however, was the way the team worked. Design and construction took place in parallel, with each technical decision being directly validated through construction. The experience demonstrated the value of collaboration between all the different disciplines involved and how significantly it can influence the quality of the final result.
This perspective continues to define the way we approach projects at Inginerie Creativă. Every experience on site contributes to improving the design process, while every new project benefits from the lessons learned from previous ones. In this way, design and construction are not two separate stages, but a continuous process focused on achieving a coherent and predictable result.
