Stuttgart / Munich, January 2009. Long time expected, now it is here: the German Certification for Sustainable Buildings. The past few months the system was tested for the first time. The certification was put through their paces on 28 office and administrative buildings: is the criteria selection successful, are the procedures manageable, do the benchmarks for gold, silver and bronze were set right? The participating building owners and designers invested a lot of work to accomplish the certification process.
The result is a transparent and practical quality rating system for buildings that is demonstrating its strengths already during the design phase: the test run showed that even during the building’s design phase can be coherent optimized in terms of overheads as well as ecological performance. The gross floor areas of the certificated buildings vary between 600 m² to 130,000 m²; including low buildings and high-rises – even the spectrum of typical office buildings up to high-tech buildings were covered.
With the award of the quality certification the second phase of the testing will start: the challenges from the on-road test will be herewith worked into the methodical fundamentals of the quality certification. Parallel to that, a systematic annotation process will be performed for the construction and real estate business lines in the next months. “We have got very much support from professionals from all disciplines. Our system is bound to be more complete, and is getting its strengths exactly through this practical approach”, is outlining the executive director of the DGNB, Christian Donath.
An appropriate height of the benchmarks for the quality certification is near to the heart of the international experienced construction engineer.
“With the current rank of the technology and with an integral strategy assignment we are near to an award. The most important is to define in time the main targets of the sustainable building construction during the design procedure.” The advantages for him are obvious: next to the advantages of the “green building” like energy-efficiency and low emissions, the achieved building quality cares mainly for higher stability of value and better market opportunities of buildings – a criterion of great importance due to the actual turbulences on the international real estate economy. “A well-founded and transparent quality mark provides more security for building owners, operators and users” says Christian Donath.
The schedule for further development of the system is clearly defined. The certification “New construction of Office and Administration buildings, Version 2008” that was developed based on the test phase, will be revised during the next months, and brought on the market as updated version 2009 in the course of this year. Up to this point, all by the DGNB submitted properties could be certified according to the present system.
An additional milestone for the sustainable building certification is the development of new system variations for different building types and existing buildings. The kick-off for this task will be in spring 2009. Under the guidance of DGNB working groups will be etablished. Experts from various areas of expertise will be involved in the development and the decision process.
One of the DGNB activity highlights in this year is once again the “Consense”. In cooperation with the Stuttgart Trade Fair this international congress and exhibition for sustainable construction will take place on 23rd and 24th June 2009 at the New Trade Fair Stuttgart. Additional certificated projects and further developments of the system will be presented there.
The guidance for the sustainable building certification has been set.
