Sustainable Design, Construction, Refurbishment and Restoration of Architecture: A Review

Oriol Pons-Valladares and Jelena Nikolic
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Oriol Pons-Valladares: Department of Architectural Technology, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Jelena Nikolic: Department of Physics, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, 08028 Barcelona, Spain

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 22, 1-18

Abstract: Considering the serious challenges our planet is facing, the building environment and construction sector must minimize their high negative impacts and maximize their contribution to sustainability. Many alternatives could promote this change, but to effectively optimize our architecture, we must take the step of quantifying and qualifying the sustainability of our constructions by choosing the best assessment alternative in each case. Many assessment methodologies and tools exist and there have been numerous reviews of them. The main objective and novelty of this review is to present an updated critical overview of all the sustainability evaluation alternatives developed in research studies in the fields of architectural design, construction, refurbishment and restoration. To achieve this, the analysis follows a specific methodology based on recent similar reviews. The result is a database with 1242 eligible documents analyzed in this review and attached as supplementary material available for future studies. As a main conclusion, rating tools and life cycle methods were found to be the most commonly applied methodologies, while the most recent tendencies use combined methods and probabilistic scenarios. This review could be useful to move towards a more sustainable building environment.

Keywords: building sustainability assessment systems (BSAS); green buildings; rating tools; life cycle assessment (LCA); multi-criteria decision making (MCDM); life cycle cost (LCC); building environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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