INTERNATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY MARKET HALL

International sustainability market hall

International Sustainability Market Hall

Introduciton

In research, crucial “aha!” moments are often the result of chance meetings between scientists outside the laboratory space, wherever they encounter each other in the course of their movement between the lab, shared equipment rooms, and common areas. Over the past four decades, laboratory design has seen incremental improvements. In reviewing these developments, one can see that a common theme has begun to emerge: Lab design must facilitate interaction, both within a research group and between research groups. Architects who design research labs know from observation and experience that successful research facilities offer environments that combine rigorous technical sophistication and flexibility with comfort, visual delight, and inspiration—“high tech plus high touch”—thereby setting the stage for constructive interactions.

There is concern about how to improve construction practices in order to minimise their detrimental affects on the natural environment (Cole, 1999; Holmes and Hudson, 2000). The environmental impact of construction, green buildings, designing for recycling and eco-labelling of building materials have captured the attention of building professionals across the world (Johnson, 1993; Cole, 1998; Crawley and Aho, 1999; Rees, 1999). Building performance is now a major concern of professionals in the building industry (Crawley and Aho, 1999) and environmental building performance assessment has emerged as one of the major issues in sustainable construction (Cole, 1998; Cooper, 1999; Holmes and Hudson, 2000).

According to Cole (1998), the definition of building performance varies according to the different interest of parties involved in building development. For instance, a building owner may wish his building to perform well from a financial point-of-view, whereas the occupants may be more concerned about indoor air quality, comfort, health and safety issues. Using a single method to assess a building's environmental performance and to satisfy all needs of users is no easy task. Therefore, an ideal environmental building assessment will include all the requirements of the different parties involved in the development.

The objective of this paper is to overview and analyse the current environmental building assessment methods used in different countries in terms of their characteristics and limitations in assessing building sustainability. Some of these assessment methods are single-dimensional when the multifaceted building sustainability needs a multi-dimensional approach. This paper presents the development of a sustainability index using a multi-criteria approach in assessing and ranking projects. It concludes by setting out a conceptual framework of a multi-criteria model for appraising projects at the feasibility stage to include environmental issues in the decision-making process.

An overview of environmental building assessment methods

Building designers and occupants have long been concerned about building performance (Cooper, 1999; Kohler, 1999; Finnveden and Moberg, 2005). Considerable work has gone into developing systems to measure a building's environmental performance over its life. They have been developed to evaluate how successful any development is with regards to balancing energy, environment and ecology, taking into account both the social and technology aspects of projects (Clements-Croome, 2004).

Separate indicators, or benchmarks based on a single criterion, have been developed to monitor specific aspects of environmental building performance ...