This book sets out to evaluate some of the greatest “Green Buildings” with the premise that, to be considered a world leading green building, the property must not just be of great sustainable design but it must also preform as a green building. This latter factor is one which is so often forgotten and is yet of primary importance to property managers. There is little point in designing a green building if it cannot perform to the design standard and be maintained at that level.
The book is authored by Jerry Yudelson, who is principal of Yudelson Associates (a sustainable design, research and consulting firm located in Tucson, Arizona), and Ulf Meyer, who has taught at Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska where he held the Hyde Chair of Excellence in 2010-2011. Meyer is a partner at Ingenhoven Architects in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is considered one of the pioneers of sustainable architecture in Europe.
The text is divided into three distinct parts; Part 1, Green Building Performance Challenges, presents an analysis of why we need green buildings and how we evaluate building sustainability measures around the world. The first chapter reveals that, while there are rating systems for sustainable building around the world, the performance of many of these buildings do not match up to the levels needed to avoid catastrophic climate change over the next several decades in that many of these buildings are not delivering effective performance in reducing energy use. In Chapter 2 the authors compare the leading rating systems used, including BREEAM, LEED, CASBEE, Green Star, NF/HQE and DGNB. They then go on to discuss the business case for building a green rated building and the associated costs of achieving a high performance building. It discusses the necessary balance between energy conservation and the design of healthy and productive workplaces.
Part 2 of this book is dedicated to providing a series of case studies drawn from the Americas, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. Each case study property has been selected against a strict set of criteria which requires the building to not only have architectural merit but to have achieved the highest ranging from one of the world ranking systems, to have been occupied for at least a year and to have energy use data available. A report on each of the selected buildings highlights the green features incorporated into the design and evaluates the energy performance of the building in use. These case studies provide a valuable insight into some of the innovative design and engineering features being utilised to achieve these high performance buildings. The selection of buildings from across a wide geographical spread also serves to demonstrate the differences in design criteria and the varying needs between cold climate regions and those in tropical and sub-tropical regions, a comparison often overlooked in text evaluating building performance.
The final part of this interesting book looks to the future and to some of the more innovative designs currently under construction serving to demonstrate the next generation of buildings, many of which seek to be carbon neutral and highly energy efficient. The book concludes with the challenge of how we not just develop sustainable green buildings, but also look towards sustainable cities and the challenges these present to designers, engineers and property managers.
This is an excellent book which provides interesting case studies of some of the best examples of green building from around the world. It differs from many of the other similar texts looking at green building design in that it focuses on buildings that are built and occupied, allowing an evaluation of actual building performance to be undertaken rather than evaluating the design based on predictive modelling. These performance measures are of particular interest to property managers because this relates to the building in use and being managed. This book will be of interest to a wide audience of architects engineers and property managers with an interest in providing green buildings that actually work to address climate change.
