In order to receive a BREEAM Award, a project must meet rigorous green building standards and achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating or higher. As anyone who has been through a BREEAM assessment will certainly tell you, that is no easy feat.
First up is the Centrum Galerie, the largest shopping center in Dresden, Germany. It also has the distinction of being the first building in Germany and in continental Europe to be awarded a BREEAM Excellent rating.
Amongst its achievements are a comprehensive lighting and energy saving mode. More importantly, daylight is used as much as possible. The high-quality design of the building means that it can achieve a 40% improvement over Germany’s 2004 green building requirements. In addition, the center has a substantial green roof and a comprehensive transport plan. This project shows that good building design and commercial priorities can clearly work hand in hand.
It’s brilliant so much architectural competition (and one hopes, tendering)is taking up the sustainability challenge now. It’s also time to take expectations further (simply because we no CAN, and so we must).
Where frameworks such as BREEAM and LEED start to let us down, is that the check-box approach to sustainability can deliver a building which scores high and is still ugly and unpleasant to live in. They are also based in 20th Century thinking that says “if we do less bad, that makes us good.”
We now need to go further by taking responsibility for our presence and our impact on the planet, and recognize that we have an opportunity for our activities to restorative: Don’t just minimize our footprint, make it positive.
A system which has emerged in North America and is now being taken global is the Living Buildings Challenge. It’s an impressive mandate, backed up by an equally impressive set of frameworks, guidelines and supports.
Starting with the premise, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?”, this is the sort of thinking and action needed in the 21st Century. http://bit.ly/9sz2Ld