ABSTRACT
Construction materials strongly influence performances of buildings. Not only specific material properties are taken into account when selecting latest constructional standards, but rather all life cycles stages. In the area of water and earthworks in addition to the conventional building materials such as timber, steel and concrete there are also increasingly used soil bioengineering building materials. Soil bioengineering structures use combination of plants with locally available auxiliary materials (wood and stone) as well as plants with classical conventional building materials. The paper gives an overview of the most relevant factors to assess selected conventional and soil bioengineering construction materials. Especially the functional capability will be analysed and discussed by the means of several examples at different levels of degradation.
