Assessment of building sustainability

Abstract

The concept of sustainable building is usually related to environmental characteristics although the social, economics and cultural indicators of the life-cycle impacts are of substancial importance. Any building level assessment method is complex and involves contradictory aspects; emphasizing the qualitative criteria only increases confusion. The R&D and standardization is thus concentrated to transparency and usability of the enviromental methods. Other directions of research are aiming at performance-based design and methods to take regional and cultural aspects into account. In this paper, 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 steps te develop a building sustainability assessment method for residential buildings.