‘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.

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