Assessing Building Performance

[lisine]

Assessing Building Performance

Author: Wolfgang F E Preiser (Editor), Jacqueline C Vischer (Editor) | Size: 5.87 MB | Format: PDF | Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann | Year: December 27, 2004 | pages: 256 | ISBN: 0750661747, ISBN-13: 978-0750661744

Review
"...this timely publication offers a collection of key methods and practical skills necessary to carry out building performance assessment." - MCEER Information Service News, March/April 2005
Book Description
An international perspective of assessing building performance.
Foreword
Why have architects talked about the assessment of building performance for so long and yet have been so slow to do anything about it? This question is particularly acute in office design, a topic that many of the chapters in this book address. Conventional office design and space planning are being challenged more and more by the new ways of working that ubiquitous information technology is making attractive and accessible to many clients and users. Old rules of thumb may not be working so well these days but they linger on in many design practices.
Post-occupancy evaluation is certainly considered by many designers and clients to be too time-consuming and expensive. Simply facing up to the reality of having to change may in itself be enough of an obstacle in the lives of busy professionals. Putting oneself in the position of potentially having to admit errors and thus opening the way to blame or even litigation may be a fear that is not even easy to admit.
These are real considerations but there are three deeper explanations all of which are addressed in this excellent book. The first is that both organizations and buildings are highly complex phenomena, not least because they are saturated by values and motives. The changing relationship between them over time makes them even harder to study and explain. Consequently and inevitably assessing building performance pushes the frontiers of social science. The second reason is that architects and designers, and many clients too, suffer from what might be called the curse of the project. Because of the ways in which design professionals, facilities managers and corporate real estate executives are constrained to work, it becomes almost impossible, operationally, day by day, for them to conceive of life as anything more than an unending series of separate, sequentially experienced projects. Generalisations become very hard to make. This quasi psychological, semi pathological condition is aggravated by the third and most fundamental reason for the general failure, so far, to put building performance assessment into common practice: the chronically fragmented and confrontational nature of the construction industry itself and, even worse, of its relationship with its clients. Supply side behaviour has become endemic.

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