There is a fundamental disconnect concerning the systems that manage building performance between what the system integrator can do and what the owner asks for. Building service performance is not handled well during building design because there is currently no accepted way for owners and designers to discuss the services desired and the performance expected for each service in simple general terms. Our construction processes deliver diverse technical systems each discussed using concrete physical attributes whose effects are understood only by those with a deep domain knowledge not often common to either owner or designer, or even to different contractors. This leads to specifying materials and processes rather than results. This is ineffective in defining success after commissioning and into long term operations and maintenance.
New demands that buildings interact dynamically with entities other than the owner and operator will demand better. The provisioning of services will be managed over the lifecycle of the building rather than merely for procedural completeness at building turnover. Three of these external scenarios are emergency management, remote analytics (to support knowledge-based maintenance and operations), and interactive negotiations with power providers.
By formalizing new semantics to enable discussion of building services and their quality, we can create a common basis for discussing service between all actors over the life of the building. The semantics will also provide the groundwork for buildings to interact with actors external to themselves.
As Adam Werbach writes, the new sustainability is about how to harmonize human culture with our relationship to the living world. Building performance, and building value, includes occupant health, and worker productivity, and not mere energy performance. , then energy performance, as well as other values such as occupant health and worker productivity
As I have noted before in this blog, we will be able to recognize success when building owners adopt these semantics to express their own concepts of value in buildings. Tomorrow’s leasing agent will use the semantics of building service performance to distinguish his properties from others on the market. Commercial real estate brokers will incorporate these measures into the CIE (Commercial Information Exchange); the measures will be reflected in commercial real estate prices.
At that point, no regulation or moral suasion will be needed at that point to drive better buildings.