Adaptive or absent: A critical review of building system resilience in the LEED rating system

Abstract

With time spent indoors dominating the lives of individuals across developed nations particularly within Europe, North America, and Australia, protecting indoor environmental quality becomes critical to protecting human health, and building systems play a critical role in doing so. As stressors like COVID-19 appear, conflicting system priorities can underline the need for resilience in all building systems. Sustainability rating frameworks are used in the engineering and architectural fields to motivate and reward the use of sustainable practices. As such, it is crucial to ensure these frameworks genuinely encourage resilience in building systems. This paper conducts a review of the LEED BD+C v4.1 framework for New Construction through a credit-level analysis. This is done to determine the extent to which resilience of building systems beyond the scope of structure is encouraged. In order to do so, relevant credits were identified, tabulated and deconstructed according to four key resilience properties: diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion. This analysis is expanded to the LEED Gold certified Husky Union Building on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. Specifically, the ventilation systems and the related awarded credits are evaluated along the same resilience properties to better understand how the LEED framework rewards resilience in practice. An analysis of the ventilation performance in terms of indoor CO2 concentration over three academic quarters is also conducted to determine how the LEED certification relates to performance. The findings conclude that while efficiency is well supported in LEED, diversity, adaptability, and cohesion can be enhanced. The HUB is found to reflect diversity and efficiency within the ventilation design but performs inadequately, failing to maintain healthy CO2 levels 9.8% and 22.4% of the time during the Autumn and Winter quarters respectively. The author concludes that the existing rating system does not adequately encourage the wide adoption of resilience needed for long- term sustainability but provides a strong base upon which improvements can be made. In short, LEED proffers credits that would reward resilient designs but does not yet actively inspire them.