The Architects’ Council of Europe responds to the EU Commission’s consultation on indicators for the assessment of environmental performance of buildings.

Last week, the Architects’ Council of Europe (ACE) submitted a response to the public consultation of the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) on draft indicators for the assessment of the environmental performance of buildings. While welcoming this initiative, ACE calls for greater recognition of architecture in the project development.

In its Communication of July 2014 on Resource Efficiency Opportunities in the Building Sector, the EU Commission announced the development of a EU framework of indicators to assess the environmental performance of buildings. These indicators shall help building professionals and their clients to prioritise their focus for making environmental improvements, as well as facilitate greater comparability of data and results from assessment and certification schemes.

ACE welcomes this initiative: transparent and harmonised metrics are needed to transform our built environment to require significantly less natural resources, to be healthy, comfortable and productive. Furthermore, these indicators may help to establish a new consensus on the definition of building quality.

In its response to the JRC consultation, ACE contends that all three pillars of building performance should be assessed: indoor environmental quality, occupant satisfaction, and the resources required to achieve these, in order to ensure that none takes preference at the price of the others.

A set of clearly defined and measurable indicators would allow professionals to compare building performance predicted in the design phase with the achieved and maintained operational performance. The benefits of such a framework of indicators would be greatly enhanced by mechanisms allowing the data collected to be shared in the public domain, thus facilitating feedback loops for continuous improvement.

ACE believes that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) should be at the core of the indicators – it would greatly support architectural design and result in more resilient buildings, if coupled with validation of achieved performance. On the other hand, life cycle cost and climate change resilience are essential to support a greater emphasis on occupant needs and better architectural quality.

ACE recommends a clearer distinction between indicators and ratings, with this initiative focusing on indicators and metrics for harmonised communication only. Moreover, references to a potential Building Passport and efforts to take advantage of BIM would be useful.

As a participant in the Steering Committee set up by the Directorate-General for Environment (DG ENVI), ACE is actively engaged in the development of this initiative and looks forward to pursuing the discussion with the other stakeholders.

Read the full ACE response to the JRC consultation on the ACE website.

The Architects’ Council of Europe (ACE) is the representative organisation for the architectural profession at European level: it aspires to speak with a single voice on its behalf in order to achieve its aims. Its membership currently consists of 43 Member Organisations, which are the regulatory and professional representative bodies in all European Union (EU) Member States, Accession Countries, Switzerland and Norway. Through them, the ACE represents the interests of over 565.000 architects from 31 countries in Europe.
    

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