Building Sustainability Assessment

Although social, economic, and cultural indicators are of substantial importance to the concept of sustainable building, this concept is usually related to environmental characteristics. Any building level assessment method is complex and involves contradictory aspects. Moreover, emphasizing qualitative criteria only increases confusion. R&D and standardization are thus concentrated to transparency and usability of the environmental methods. Other directions of research aim at performance-based design and methods to take regional and cultural aspects into account. In this paper, the perspectives of the sustainability assessment of a whole building are presented, based on a state of the art, feasibility study on performance analysis and the development of an extended life-cycle assessment for buildings. Using various tools, and based on the case studies of building sustainability assessment, environmental indicators were often shown to be of lesser importance than the other, soft ones. The first steps in the development of a building sustainability assessment method for Portuguese residential buildings will be presented and discussed in the end.