Sustainable Design Process & Integrated Façades

The effective implementation of sustainable construction is increasingly being highlighted as the key to meeting the ambitious sustainability targets that have been set.
Contemporary planning practice shows that multi criteria requirements and the current lack of appropriate methods, tools and data resources often hinder a sufficient implementation of sustainability aspects in the design stage of a construction project. As a consequence, stakeholder awareness of systemic effects in decision making processes is severely limited.
A new integrated design and sustainability assessment approach for integral façades is presented via an inter-faculty and inter-disciplinary research project at TU Graz.
Two parallel and complementary research approaches aimed to foster the progressive consideration and implementation of sustainability requirements in the current design process. So-called “integral façades” influence a number of socio-functional, technical, economic and environmental criteria in context with the sustainability performance improvement of buildings. This book describes the step-by-step implementation of systemic sustainability assessment based on integral façades.
The process model presented here is intended to support decision makers in sustainable construction and provide information relevant for an understanding of the systemic behavior of sustainable design processes.