nZEB Expo 2026: About the Design and Build Process
- Adriana POPA
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Building a house is a much more complex process than it may seem at first glance. Dozens of specialists are involved in delivering a project, including 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 their impact on costs and construction timelines.
During nZEB Expo 2026, Cătălin Caraza started 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 these stages manage to work together.
This is where the Design & Build concept comes in
It is not simply an organizational model or a type of contract, but an approach in which design and construction are conceived as parts of the same process.
When teams collaborate from the earliest stages of a project, decisions are better grounded, and the proposed solutions can be implemented without compromises during the construction stage.
In the presentation below, Cătălin Caraza explains how this philosophy has taken shape over time and why it is now one of the principles underlying the projects developed by Inginerie Creativă.
How the Design & Build approach took shape
The Design & Build approach did not emerge from a desire to simplify a process, but from the experience gained through projects in which design and construction were treated as a whole.
An important milestone was participation in Solar Decathlon Europe 2012, where Cătălin Caraza, Marius Șoflete, and Octavian Timu were part of the team that represented Romania with the Casa Prispa 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 overall.
The experience that shaped the way we work
More important than the competition results, however, was the way the team worked. Design and construction took place in parallel, and every technical decision was directly validated through construction.
The experience demonstrated how valuable collaboration between all disciplines can be 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 the construction site contributes to improving the design process, while each new project benefits from the lessons learned from previous ones.
In this way, design and construction are not two separate stages, but rather a continuous process focused on achieving a coherent and predictable result.
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