Green Building Certifications.

There are many different green building certifications around the world that rate buildings on a variety of factors. I am most familiar with LEED, in the United States, but there was one leading rating system that was established before LEED. BREEAM, Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, is UK’s rating system towards green design. BREEAM has been a very important rating system that has influenced LEED and many other rating systems around the world. BREAM is composed of the following categories: Management, waste, health and well-being, pollution, energy, land use and ecology, transport, materials, water, and innovation. Check out the Lion House in Alnwick, Northumberland, UK below. This city block office building rated an Outstanding on the BREEAM scale and scored an 87.2%. Some particular innovative features that helped this office space achieve this score include the building was fabricated to feed energy back into the national grid by powering the office with wind turbines, a solar thermal panel producing hot water in the building, and the use of locally harvested and sustainable materials for the majority of the buildings elements.

One rating system that I find is most important to me is LEED. LEED is well known in North America but involves 90 other countries. LEED, like the other rating systems, takes a whole building approach and is rated on the following categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, innovation and design process, and regional priority credits. I am going to go into details of how to achieve ratings in each category, as this rating system is the most applicable to me. Gaining credits in sustainable sights entails site selection, development density, community connectivity, and alternative transportation. For example a building could receive credits by providing an area with bikes and a changing room so people can in return reduce the amount of air pollutants caused by driving a car. Credits for water efficiency entails reducing and recycling the amount of water used. Interior designers can have a direct impact towards gaining these credits as they can encourage clients to purchase water-efficient toilets, faucets, and showerheads or to use nonpotable water for other purposes. To obtain energy and atmosphere credits entails a building to use the most effective way in optimizing energy performance of lighting power, lighting controls, HVAC, equipment and appliances and integrating that into the whole building approach. Interior designers can impact this category directly by recommending energy-efficient lighting systems, equipment, and systems. To obtain credits in the materials and resources category the materials and resources in a building need to reduce the amount of waste, overall minimize the impact on the environment, and use recycled or responsibly sources materials. An interior designer has a large impact on this category, as they are the ones recommending the majority of materials and resources used in a building. So it is therefore important for an interior designer to reuse as many materials as possible and examine where materials come from and if they are rapidly renewable. Some examples of approved LEED materials include wool carpeting, strawboard, bamboo, cork flooring, and geotextiles fabrics like coconut or jute fibers. One other way to get a higher rating in this category is to provide facilities in a building to collect and store recyclables. This is something the interior designer should integrate into their design to get points with LEED in this category. To gain credits for indoor environmental quality a building must provide users with control of their lighting and thermal components as well as providing people with the benefits of daylight and views to the outdoors.

Check out the first LEED parking garage in Santa Monica, CA. This is so great for many reasons. The first being that it is a parking garage! Parking garages waste a large amount of space as they are only fully occupied one time of the year (Christmas) and they also encourage the use of non-renewable resources like driving your car to get places. However the parking structure provides solar panels acting as shade and the roof of the structure, recycled materials in the construction of the envelope, is dedicated to electrical cars by providing outlets to reboot, and provides free bike parking.

After learning about all of these rating systems they seem to apply mainly to architects, engineers, and building contractors. However it is important for an interior designer to have knowledge of these rating systems for a number of reasons. First there is a whole team that makes up the project of a building. So it is therefore important for an interior designer to understand each component involved with the certification process to be able to communicate ideas with other team members as well as collaborate in different areas. Another reason is the fact that some categories, like materials and resources, apply directly to the interior designer. So it is therefore important for a designer to understand the components that make up said category to help a building rate the highest. Another important quality for an interior designer to have is the knowledge of a variety of rating systems all over the world. As this will come in handy when working on international project and for clients over seas, especially if they are green projects.

*Information received from: http://inhabitat.com/first-leed-certified-parking-garage/, http://www.usgbc.org, http://www.breeam.org, Sustainable design for interior environments . (2nd ed.). Fairchild Books.