‘GREEN’ BUILDINGS

‘GREEN’ BUILDINGS:..................................................................................................................

Are ‘green’ buildings working from the building users’ perspective? This paper presents initial findings from 45 Australian buildings  with a view to highlighting lessons towards developing successful green buildings. By ‘green’ we mean buildings that have been created with explicit intent to include environmentally sustainable design (ESD) features and principles. Although the objective may be to create buildings with less environmental impact, they may not necessarily achieve this in reality. While the relative performance of buildings can be measured in terms of aspects such as water and energy efficiency, it is vital to understand the experience of the buildings from the users’ point of view. Not only can a poorly performing building affect users’ well being and productivity, in addition, subsequent measures needed to alleviate users’ discomfort can result in great expense and in the building failing to achieve its efficiency targets. Our discussion here deals with end-user responses. A more complete picture would require study of both technical performance, including detailed energy assessment using measured data over a period of time, in conjunction with occupant surveys. This is not attempted within the present study, which is limited to building users’ experiences and feedback.

Why do occupants appear more tolerant
of green buildings?


Indoor environment research on thermal comfort  show that users are more often tolerant of conditions where they have more control, sometimes irrespective of whether conditions are actually physically better. Users appear to be happier if they understand how the building is supposed to work either because the design intent is made clear and/or because the controls are easy to understand and work well.