1945 — 2020
Engr. Nazar Siddiqui
He opened this practice in Karachi in 1981 and put it on the register of the Pakistan Engineering Council eleven months later. It still carries his name and practises on that registration, and every hospital, campus and academy on this site was drawn in the office he made.
- Founded the practice
- Karachi, 1981
- PEC register
- 4 June 1982
- Graduated
- NED, Karachi, 1971
Founder
Engr. Nazar Siddiqui
1945 — 2020
The founder
The practice began with one engineer
Engr. Nazar Siddiqui took his civil engineering degree at NED in Karachi in 1971, and spent the eleven years that followed inside other people’s firms — large multidisciplinary consultancies, the kind that carry a project from the survey to the site. In 1981 he left to open one of his own, and on 4 June 1982 he entered it on the register of the Pakistan Engineering Council.
What he set up was unusual for a practice starting from nothing. Not a drawing office that sent the rest of the work out, but one that could take a commission whole: the survey, the plan, the structure, the services, and the engineer standing on site while it went up. His own work ran across structures, hydraulics and urban planning. The office grew around that breadth and has never lost it.
He served on technical committees of the Pakistan Engineering Council, which sets the standards the profession works to, and as Vice President of the Association of Consulting Engineers, Pakistan. He led the firm for thirty-nine years, until he passed away in 2020.
He left no memoir. What he left is the office — a registration in unbroken standing since 1982, a way of working that has not needed changing, and people who learned it from him.
- Lifetime
- 1945 — 2020
- Graduated
- NED, Karachi, 1971
- Founded the practice
- 1981
- Registered with PEC
- 4 June 1982
- Served on
- PEC technical committees
- ACEP
- Vice President
What he built
One office, and every discipline inside it
A practice this size normally specialises. His did not, and that is the decision the firm still lives on: a client deals with one consultant instead of co-ordinating five. The office took its multi-discipline registration with the Pakistan Engineering Council while he was running it. What follows is what it covered in his time, and what it covers now.
- 01Master planning
- 02Architecture
- 03Structural engineering
- 04MEP engineering
- 05Infrastructure and road engineering
- 06Project management
- 07Construction supervision and quality assurance
- 08Highways and bridge engineering
- 09Dredging and marine works
Each of them is set against the projects that evidence it on the services page.
Today
The practice today
The firm is led by his sons. Engr. Atif Nazar Siddiqui is Chief Executive and Engr. Wasif Nazar Siddiqui is Managing Director, and it practises as ATIF NAZAR (Pvt.) Ltd. on the registration their father took out in 1982.
Engr. Wasif Nazar Siddiqui is Honorary Secretary of the Association of Consulting Engineers, Pakistan — the association his father served as Vice President — and has been elected a board member of FIDIC Asia Pacific, the first Pakistani to serve on any board of the International Federation of Consulting Engineers since it was founded in 1913. He has also contributed to the Pakistan Engineering Council’s Standard Bidding Documents Committee.
FIDIC publishes the contract suite used on most multilateral-development-bank funded work, which is the procurement environment this practice competes in.
Engr. Atif Nazar Siddiqui, left / Engr. Wasif Nazar Siddiqui, right
With Cemal Sangu, Consul General of Türkiye, centre.
The work
What the office he opened is doing now
Three from the record: a teaching institute in interior Sindh, a naval hospital in Islamabad, and a medical school for a university abroad. Each is documented in full.
Next step
Meet the engineers who sign the drawings
The three engineers who have led this practice since 1981, and the offices they hold.