Critical Frameworks for Building Evaluation: Total Building Performance, Systems Integration, and Levels of Measurement and Assessment

Abstract

Although there has been heated discussion over the past few years about the need for both objective and subjective field evaluation methods, there has been very little discussion about the need to complete those field evaluations in all performance areas simultaneously. One possible explanation of this void might be the difficulty that the design community has in defining total building performance, much less establishing limits of acceptability and testing for them. Notwithstanding, there have been some collective attempts at the definition of total building performance by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, 1972), the International Standards Organization (ISO, 1972), and the Centre Internationale de Batîment (OB, 1982). The authors of this chapter have built on these efforts, to develop a more manageable yet comprehensive list of six performance mandates for the built environment: spatial quality, thermal quality, acoustic quality, visual quality, air quality, and long-term building integrity against degradation (figure 1) (Hartkopf, Lof tness, Mill, 1983).