Sustainability-oriented approach to assist decision makers in building facade management

Abstract

The building sector has a major economic, environmental, and social impact on society; hence, it is crucial to promote sustainable construction practice. The facade is one of the largest main components of a building, which could strongly contribute to the sustainability performance for the whole building. Previous studies started defining tools to assess facade sustainability, although relevant indicators were dismissed or, if considered, they were rather subjectively quantified. Likewise, most existing tools omit stakeholder satisfaction in the assessment process for optimal facade systems. In this regard, this paper presents a new systematic approach based on the Integrated Value Model for Sustainable Assessment (MIVES) for holistic sustainability assessment of building facade systems by integrating stakeholders’ satisfaction in the decision-making process. To this end, for the first time to the authors’ best knowledge, the most representative and discriminative indicators for quantifying facade sustainability were identified to define a new approach to minimize subjectivity in the decision-making process and, consequently, to ease the task of decision makers when choosing and designing facade alternatives for new buildings and rehabilitation. This approach is validated and initially applied to assess the six most common residential facade systems in Barcelona, Spain. Results indicate that these building elements have low to medium sustainability performance.