GPOP: REPRESENTATION OF SUSTAINABILITY CONSIDERATIONS ON BUILDING PROJECTS

ABSTRACT Sustainable development has attracted much attention in recent years and has created an increasing awareness of environmental issues affecting construction projects. Stakeholders of sustainable building projects seek inspiration and benchmarks on existing sustainable buildings. However, the documentation of the sustainability considerations (SC) on building projects is inconsistent and usually focused on the design solution with little or no attention to the project requirements or process and organizational aspects of the design. The comparison of sustainable projects is therefore difficult due to the varied nature and extent of the documented sustainability considerations. We propose a systematic representation of the SC, which we call gPOP model, that facilitates the comparison of sustainable projects. We created gPOP models of twelve recognized green buildings which led to a list of the 36 most common sustainability considerations (MCSC). We show that our representation of the SC allows the comparison of sustainable projects and helps uncover insights that otherwise remained hidden in the free-form text-based narratives used for documenting the SC