Sustainable Building Assessment

Abstract

Constructions during past decades have created environmental problems, which become unbearable intoday world society. It is clear now that, if we can not delay or stop the increment of green house effect, major cities willsooner be under sea level. In the past decade, “green building” concept has been introduced, with goal to promoteenergy saving building. There are assessment tools such as BREEM, LEED and GB Tool that were developed toevaluate level of green building. However, these assessment systems are not comprehensive, especially on environmentalissues. The word “sustainable building” is becoming more comprehensive, with aim to cover also quality of life, safety,and internal and external environment. There are also more talks related to social and economic development.

The Comprehensive Assessment System for Building Environmental Efficiency (CASBEE) has been developedand becoming popular among Asian countries. China, for example, has applied the system for the development ofGreen Olympic 2008. Singapore has been applying the system to control building construction, and has been welladvanced on the management of construction waste. Japan has been developed the system to regulatory level. Theassessment system will also be used to mark value of the building in the future. Building with “Sustainable Building”mark will be more valuable. The architect and engineers should be aware of such assessment system, and designbuilding to achieve high score. The same principle will be applied for the development of “Sustainable City.” SB05Tokyo Conference in 2005 will be another international venue with goal on action for sustainability.

Building owner should understand about Building Life Cycle. Investment in real estate has increased in valuewhen time passed. But this belief is not always true. It has been proved that only quality building has higher valuethrough time. To maintain value of the building, the building owner has to renovate or upgrade building continuously.

Sustainable development has increasingly become the new direction for future commercial buildingdevelopment, which includes new standard on environment, energy and safety. The CASBEE uses hypotheticalboundary to define building with assessment category “Q” as positive impact inside boundary and category “L” asnegative impact outside boundary. The value of “Q” and “L” will be used on the rating chart and will determine the levelof sustainable building.

There is also specific assessment system for Building Energy Efficiency, and Building Safety.

Building developer may find these new and coming assessment systems as adding cost to construction, andbuilding management. But these assessment system also differentiate quality building and provide value added.More important, the building assessment system is the necessary measure for sustainable development.