Development of a sustainability assessment tool for office buildings

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to develop a sustainability assessment tool to assess the sustainability of office buildings in urban areas, according to the Portuguese environmental, social and economy contexts. This new approach is a contribution for the office buildings module of SBToolPT methodology. Since there is already a module suitable to assess the sustainability of residential buildings, this work is aimed to adapt the work developed so far to the context of office buildings. This paper starts with the analysis and discussion of the urgency to develop tools that could be used to support the design of sustainable office buildings. Afterwards the development of the proposed methodology is presented, discussing the parameters proposed to support the sustainable design and the sustainability assessment.