Abstract
The building that houses the Mirvac School of Sustainable Development at Bond University is the first educational building to achieve a six Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia. It has won numerous awards since opening in August 2008 including being judged the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) Sustainable Building of 2009. After more than two years in use a post-occupancy evaluation study was carried out to assess the performance of the building from the viewpoint of the users; both resident staff and transient students. Results for factors such as lighting, thermal comfort, noise and air quality. were compared to benchmarks established by the Usable Buildings Trust. The evaluation also assessed the occupants’ perceptions of the building’s impact on their own productivity. Users generally find the building provides a comfortable work environment although a number of areas of performance were noted as posing some concerns. These included intrusive noise in some parts of the building and some issues with glare in daylit teaching spaces. Such concerns were found to be in accord with the results of previous studies and they highlight some recurrent problems in “green” buildings designed to maximise the use of natural ventilation and natural light. These design challenges and how occupant satisfaction is to be measured and benchmarked are also discussed in the context of this comparative building study.
Highlights
It seems obvious that any manufactured product, whether a car, a television or a building, would be tested in use to see if it works well
The historical evidence is that not all green buildings perform well, while some have been rated better than conventional (“non-green”) buildings the buildings most poorly rated by occupants are green buildings
In terms of occupant comfort the Mirvac building performs well in its own right and when compared to the Usable Buildings Trust benchmarks for Australian buildings and those studied in warm-temperate climates
Summary
It seems obvious that any manufactured product, whether a car, a television or a building, would be tested in use to see if it works well. Very expensive products, tend to be one-off creations so unlike cars and televisions they are seldom tested, redesigned and refined in the way that mass produced items are It could be argued, that as each building is individually designed that feedback from completed buildings, those of similar function located in comparable environments (geographical, social, financial and so on) would routinely be sought in order to inform the design of subsequent buildings and to improve these designs. The advent of green buildings in recent years has seen some major changes in the way base buildings are designed with much greater emphasis on energy efficiency, material choice and water usage. These new designs have provided opportunities to create different built environments – workspaces which emphasise quality as well as cost performance criteria (Vischer, 2008)
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