Sustainable Construction, 5th Edition

Part IIAssessing High-Performance Green Buildings

For many industry professionals, high-performance green buildings are defined by the assessment systems that rate and certify them. Building assessment systems simply score a building project on how well it lines up with the general philosophical approach developed by the designers of the system. As a result, a building assessment system provides a standard definition for green building for the country employing it. In the United States, for example, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) or Green Globes building assessment systems, together with the assessment categories, and the allocation of points for various green attributes define green building for the American marketplace, both public and private. One advantage of relying on building assessment systems for this purpose is that it standardizes the boundaries of what constitutes a high-performance green building, what its important attributes are, and how the performance of the project across a wide variety of categories is measured. A significant disadvantage of these assessment systems is that each is simply one organization's vision of a green building, and often, because of time and financial constraints, assessment systems leave much to be desired. For example, many assessment systems rely on energy modeling to forecast energy consumption rather than using actual energy data as the arbiter of success. The result has been the occasional embarrassing ...