Page 42 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

20 GREEN BUILDINGS TODAY

purposes of this book, I will be using “high-performance” buildings to designate those
that achieved a Gold- or Platinum-level certification from the U.S. or Canadian LEED
systems. This is not entirely a fair choice, because there are some excellent green
buildings that only achieved a LEED Silver status; however, increasingly, one must
ask that a high-performance building achieve LEED Gold or Platinum. There might even
be examples of Zero Net Energy buildings that one would consider “high-performance”
from an energy efficiency standpoint that don’t achieve a Gold or Platinum level des-
ignation, but in my experience, it’s highly unlikely.
The essence of LEED is that it is a point-based rating system that allows vastly dif-
ferent green building attributes to be compared with one resulting aggregate score.
This gives it the ability to label a wide variety of buildings and to rate very dissimi-
lar approaches to sustainable design with one composite score. Many will (and do)
argue with the relative importance of various categories of concern, but this rating
system will soon be 10 years old; it has stood the test of time through continuous
improvement and openness to intelligent modification and innovation. Because it is
point-based, LEED also appeals to the competitive spirit in the North American psy-
che, which values winning very highly and which associates getting “more points”
with winning.
Interestingly, LEED is being seen around the world as a good example of a rating
system that is practical to use, but which still signals achievements in sustainable
design, construction, and operations far above the norm for most buildings.* Over the
years, LEED has continually tweaked its credits to stay at the leading edge of green
building design. In 2009, LEED will undergo a major adjustment to increase its flex-
ibility, while maintaining its rigor and credibility, through the adoption of LEED v3
(or LEED 2009). This new approach is a system that will give design and construction
teams far more flexibility in picking which credits to pursue in a given geographic
region or for meeting client preferences that might, for example, value energy savings
or water savings much more than the current system.
In September 2006, the U.S. General Services Administration reported to Congress
that it would use only the LEED system for assessing the government’s own projects. †
The U.S. Army planned to adopt LEED in 2008, to replace its own homegrown
“Spirit” rating systems. Therefore, in the commercial and institutional arena, if a project
is not rated and certified by an independent third-party with an open process for cre-
ating and maintaining a rating system, it can’t really be called a green building, since
there’s no other standard definition.
If someone tells you they are “following LEED” but not bothering to apply for
certification of the final building, you should rightly wonder if they would really
achieve the results they claim. If they say they are doing “sustainable design,” you

*For example, a similar approach is being pursued by the German Green Building Council, Deutsche
Gesellschaft für nachhaltiges Bauen, which was formed in 2007, www.dgnb.de, accessed July 31, 2008.
† General Services Administration, Report to Congress, September 2006 [online], https://www.usgbc.
org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=1916, accessed March 6, 2007.