A new systemic approach to improve the sustainability performance of office buildings in the early design stage
Journal article, 2015

Different users and investors´ project preferences, often lead to trade-offs during the early design phase of a project. Currently, decisions of design options and their technical measures are mainly reduced to an instantaneously assessed criterion (i.e. energy efficiency) within the sustainability assessment of buildings. Due to criteria interdependency, the current linear applied approach used in building certification neglects criteria trade-offs and is therefore only partly suitable for holistic building improvement processes. In order to fulfil stakeholder interests on the one hand and a high sustainability performance on the other, it is crucial to identify appropriate design measures. Based on the Austrian building certification system ÖGNI/DGNB, we applied a systemic approach for building sustainability-improvement, using a case study of a public office building in Graz, Austria. The main part of the study describes the important steps required for the systemic optimization of building sustainability. The method applied in this study allows the quantification of the relative influence and the identification of the individual optimization potential of design options on each single assessment criterion. The proposed systemic approach clearly demonstrated the improvement potential of the currently most developed building certification system considering the interdependency between the individual criteria.

ÖGNI/DGNB

systemic 15 approach

LCA

BIM

Building certification

multi-criteria design optimization

building sustainability assessment

network analysis

LCCA

Author

Helmuth Kreiner

Technische Universität Graz

Alexander Passer

Technische Universität Graz

Holger Wallbaum

Chalmers, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Building Technology

Energy and Buildings

0378-7788 (ISSN)

Vol. 109 385-396

Subject Categories

Architectural Engineering

Environmental Analysis and Construction Information Technology

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Building Futures (2010-2018)

Energy

DOI

10.1016/j.enbuild.2015.09.040

More information

Latest update

3/19/2018