Week6 in-session reflection

This week is Green Star foundation workshop.

This lecture talked about whole basic knowledge about Green Star. Because my group assignment is relevant to Green Star, so it is useful. After listening to lecturer, I learned a lot. I’m now familiar with the framework, and had a basic idea about assignment1.

Week6 pre-session activity: Benchmarking building performance: what can we learn from LEED?

Dr Jeroen van der Heijden have provided his critical thinking about LEED. Among these views, I am interested in LEED certification and LEED is mandatory by the US government.

Just as the article said, LEED certification is easier to get because there are various ‘cheat sheets’ available online so that designers and developers can easy to achieve the standard. Moreover, LEED does not consider about the performance and operation after the building has been established. However, LEED is now mandatory in the US government because they think LEED criteria is sufficient to meet construction regulations. These I think may lead to some problems, for example, some buildings can receive LEED certification and meet governmental regulations by cheating so that some criteria the building does not achieve, which may cause harmful impacts. Thus, the government should be carefully select the criteria of LEED and decide which can be used as regulations.

Week5 post-session review: Beyond Carbon Neutrality: Strategies for Reductive and Restorative Sustainability

This article focuses on reductive and restorative sustainability to provide solutions to minimize harmful influences on the environment through building processes.

I am interested in reductive sustainability part of this article because this part is mainly about materials and my another course is about materials as well. As it is said in this article, materials in the building play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. It is necessary for designers to have carefully consideration to choose materials because good materials can help to reduce energy consumption, for example, in order to improve energy efficiency, maximizing thermal mass is vital, in winter, materials with high thermal mass value can absorb and store heat from the sun so that they can reduce the use of air conditioning and heater, which can save energy. Therefore, rating tools have established systems to verify whether materials in the building is sustainable. In addition, a company called the footprint company has already created a system to investigate the embodied carbon emission of materials.