Comparing Adaptation and Demolition & New Build for office buildings in the newly developed ADNB Indicator

Comparing Adaptation and Demolition & New Build for office buildings in the newly developed ADNB Indicator

Damwijk, R.M.

Remøy, H.T. (mentor)
De Jong, P. (mentor)

Architecture and The Built Environment

Real Estate & Housing

2015-10-28

The built environment is one of the major causes of climate change that is felt around the world. Therefore there is an increasing global and local focus on strategies that address the causes of climate change and these strategies are continuously being designed and developed. The built environment contributes about half of all greenhouse gas emissions and this problem needs to be tackled. This can be realized by tempering the demand for energy, land and materials resulting from new developments by taking better care of the existing building stock. Investments are necessary to increase the sustainability of the built environment. Cities like Melbourne and Sydney are already actively promoting building adaptive reuse as a strategy that supports their programme for developing carbon-neutral cities, while in the Netherlands building adaptation is mostly driven by vacancy. Office vacancy is another major problem in the Netherlands. Long-term vacancy is very unfavourable because of the continuing energy use and maintenance while the building is not used for any function. The embodied energy in buildings lowers due to reuse and recycling of building materials, which also reduces waste. This is one of the clear advantages of adaptation. However, new constructions with recyclable materials, possibly retrieved from demolition works, also reduce waste. So the question here is, which one of the two strategies, adaptation or demolition & new build, is considered to be more environmentally sustainable. Both strategies can be used in order to reduce office vacancy in the Netherlands. The combination of the environmental problems, of which the built environment causes a major part, and the problem of office vacancy is the starting point of this research. To compare Adaptation and Demolition & New Build as a strategy for office buildings when concerning environmental sustainability, a Step-by-Step Decision Support Plan named the ADNB Indicator was developed. The ADNB Indicator consists of four steps, where step 1 is a veto checklist to determine whether this plan is suitable for the office building in question. Step 2 entails adjusting the weighting to user preference and leads to step 3 with a score card that consists of statements that need to be answered with yes or no. These statements are part of the aspects Location, Building design, Energy, Material use, and Services. And finally step 4 shows the result of how the two strategies score. To use the ADNB Indicator in practise, it is developed in Excel.

Adaptation
Demolition & New Build
Environmental sustainability
Step-by-Step Decision Support Plan

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d777e07b-43c4-4c26-afb6-5f6da2de151c

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Damwijk, R.M.