Building sustainability assessment

Abstract

Although the social, economic and cultural indicators are of substantial importance, the concept of sustainable building is usually related to environmental characteristics. Any building level assessment method is complex and involves contradictory aspects. Moreover emphasizing qualitative criteria only increases confusion. The R&D and standardization is thus concentrated to transparency and usability of the environmental methods. Other directions of research are aiming at performance-based design and methods to take regional and cultural aspects into account. In this paper, the perspectives of the sustainability assessment of a whole building are presented based on the state-of-the art, feasibility study on performance analysis and development of extended LCA for buildings. Based on the case studies of building sustainability assessment using various tools, the environmental indicators were shown to be often of lesser importance than the other, soft ones. At the end, will be presented and discussed the first steps in the development of a building sustainability assessment method for Portuguese residential buildings.