The application of two sustainability assessment tools on a passive office in Flanders: a user-approach

During the last decade, a large number of building sustainability assessment tools have been developed, with the aim of determining the sustainability level of buildings through a range of evaluation themes and criteria. As these tools are meant to contribute to the sustainability of building design, insights in the usability of these tools in practice is required. Therefore, we compared two frequently used sustainability assessment tools in Flanders, namely BREEAM-NL Building in Use for existing offices and Assessment of Office Buildings, on their degree of user-friendliness and applicability in a post-construction assessment. In this research paper, the outcome of this comparison is discussed. In general, the user-friendliness and applicability turned out to be quite good. However, the time and labour input needed might be a substantial threshold for new users. Further research will be done in the near future on the user-friendliness and applicability of such tools along the design process.