Building Rating Tools

The technical advances and industry uptake of building rating schemes and assessment tools are both growing rapidly. ¹ Despite this impressive growth, however, they are still used in only a small portion of buildings. ² These building assessment and rating tools each have heuristic value. They also serve as a means of demonstrating compliance with local regulations and standards. However, they tend to promote ‘best practice’ instead of a sustainability standard. In effect, they encourage incremental approaches, marginal thinking and ‘tradeoffs’. They also tend to supplant design thinking with managerial ‘displacement activity’, by requiring developers/designers to invest human and financial resources in measuring, monitoring, mitigating and managing negative impacts, instead of design. ³ While many of these tools apply ‘whole of life-cycle’ accounting, their analytical framework is essentially reductionist, data-intensive, aggregative and sequential. Like environmental impact assessments, they evaluate a design ‘retrospectively’, rather than helping us design something completely new [Chapter 7]. Thus they prioritize bean counting over design, accounting over accountability, and prediction over performance.