Creating a Public Web Database about High Performance (Green) Buildings

SUMMARY A U. S. federal agency has developed a public web database to centralize and distribute information about sustainable and high-performance buildings. Available since May 2002, the database contains more than 50 completed case studies with another 50 nearing completion. The database collects information related to a building’s physical attributes, design process, finance and cost, site, water use, landscaping, materials, indoor air quality, and energy use. It uses submitted information to produce case studies of building projects, which include photo galleries as well as bibliographies of any additional information published about the buildings. Anyone can submit a building project to the database for review and eventual publication at www.highperformancebuildings.gov/case_studies. 1. INTRODUCTION Many sustainable buildings have been completed or are currently under construction. Such buildings are considered leading edge because they address a building’s environmental impact as well as a building’s affect on its occupants. Considerable information about these buildings exists and making this information available on the World Wide Web offers tremendous potential to help improve future generations of buildings worldwide. In the past, performance information about buildings was limited to aggregate totals of the building stock (Energy Information Administration2002), and case studies in books or on CD -ROM. Examples of these case studies include the Green Building Advisor (Building Green 2002) and Green Developments (Rocky Mountain Institute 2002). The work required to create case studies such as the above is often repeated unnecessarily and project teams are still being inundated with repetitive requests for information. The World-Wide Web allows information to be quickly updated and widely accessed. This paper describes a new web-based High Performance Buildings (HPB) database that captures the multi-faceted nature of sustainable building concepts and provides a mechanism for disseminating information to advance the building industry. This public database features projects withinnovations in fields such as energy efficiency, materials use, and water conservation. The database can store and display information on projects of all sizes, ranging from campuses and neighborhoods to homes and even commercial interiors. Although it s iintended to describe projects in great detail, most data fields are optional, so less detailed