Sustainable Building Challenge'08

Teams  and Case Studies

Sustainable Building Challenge'08

Teams  and Case Studies

The objective of SB Challenge is to provide a display of information on the performance of buildings, including performance assessment results and key performance indicators.

SB Challenge is an international project that has included more than 20 countries over the last ten years. Results are shown at a series of tri-annual international conferences, which to date have included very successful events in Vancouver (GBC ‘98), Maastricht (SB 2000), Oslo SB02 and the Tokyo SB05 conference. The SB08 Conference in Melbourne was the latest venue for SB Challenge teams and projects. The 50+ projects being shown and discussed at SB08 come from 14 countries and include the results of eight different rating systems.

Why is there so much interest in this area?

The main reason appears to be that researchers and government agencies are viewing performance rating and labelling systems as one of the best methods of moving the performance benchmarks in the marketplace towards a higher level of performance. There is a growing realization that a major jump in performance levels, at least in market economies, will depend on changes in market demand, and that such change cannot occur until building investors and tenants have access to relatively objective and simple methods that allow them to identify buildings that perform to a higher standard. The advantages of having a global standard for building performance assessment and labelling cannot be overemphasized.

If meaningful information about performance is to be exchanged between countries, then a uniform definition of performance parameters must be developed, even if the calculation tools providing data on, for example, energy consumption and emissions, vary between countries. Further, the rapid growth of global corporations, and their desire to work to a common standard, give this work a significant commercial importance in the medium term.

Projects, including offices, multi-unit apartment buildings (MURBs), schools and mixed-use buildings, were selected for their suitability to test the assessment systems such as SBTool and its regional derivatives, LEED, Green Globes as well as other regional systems.

Details of each assessment process and its result were presented at the conference sessions. Beyond their value in testing the system, the Case Study projects provided also outstanding examples of the sustainable approaches in design and construction that are needed to adopt.

iiSBE is responsible for the international management and development of SBC.
For this cycle, the work was coordinated by Dr. Günter Löhnert of Germany.

SBC'08 Case Studies

representing countries, universities, corporations, associations or professionals

Country