Sustainable Construction, 5th Edition

Chapter 7The Green Building Design Process

The high-performance building movement is changing both the nature of the built environment and the delivery systems used to design and construct the facility according to a client's needs. The result has been the emergence of the high-performance green building delivery system, introduced in Chapter 1. This delivery system is distinguishable from conventional practice by the selection of project team members based on their green building expertise, increased collaboration among the project team members, more focus on integrated building performance than on building systems, heavy emphasis on environmental protection during the construction process, careful consideration of occupant and worker health throughout all phases, scrutiny of all decisions for their resource and life-cycle implications, the added requirement of building commissioning, and the emphasis placed on reducing construction and demolition waste. Some of these differences are driven by certification requirements, while others are part of the evolving culture of green building.

This chapter more fully describes the differences between standard practice and the green building process, paying particular attention to the highly collaborative charrette process, probably one of the most distinguishing hallmarks of contemporary green building. Newer tools, such as building information modeling (BIM) that produce three-dimensional representations of the model that are linked ...