A truly sustainable project of any size should be outcome of an integrated and iterative design activity performed by a multi-disciplinary team of professionals and relevant stakeholders starting from very early phases of design development. High-performance design solutions should be explored through systems thinking mindset at component and whole-building level with continuous support from professionals who are subject matter experts utilizing computational tools to received quantified feedback for informed design decisions. The fundamental objective should be finding solutions at the nexus of triple bottom line objectives that inherently involve energy efficiency and carbon reductions (environment), financial profitability (economy) and responding to building users’ needs for improved occupational comfort and well-being (people). Instead of compliance-based design approaches favoring post rationalization of design decisions, a performance-based approach has to be adopted. Such an approach avoids shifting sustainable design explorations and necessary analyses outside the discipline of architecture and prevents design development methods that are fixated on meeting minimal standards with incremental improvements in building assemblies and system efficiencies guided by energy standards and codes.
Sustainability concepts to be incorporated into a design project can best be identified through early interaction of multi-disciplinary team members (during design charrettes) and they can best be evolved by continuous and iterative testing via use of simulation-based, predictive and analytical methods. In sum, absolute success in a sustainable project necessitates multi-valent approaches at the dimensions of project members (multi-disciplinary), fundamental objectives to be pursued (the triple bottom line) as well as the tools and methods utilized during fundamental states of project development (parametric modeling for whole-building energy and environmental performance simulations).
Omer T. Karaguzel, PhD
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