Radical Sustainable Innovation of office buildings

• The recent development of technologies, processes and methods of sustainable building has enabled anunprecedented quantum leap in the available solutions. These possibilities could be interpreted asradical, yet they appear at a time as results of a long emergent development. The aim of this paper is tocritically scrutinize, theoretically and empirically, whether radical innovation is occurring insustainable building and what the implication are.The theoretical framework is based on concepts ofradical innovation, inventions and sustainability. Radical sustainable innovation (RSI) should becharacterized by high degrees of newness in the entire life cycle. RSI should offer significantenhancements of known benefits, entirely new benefits, or substantial cost reductions, leading to thetransformation of existing markets, the creation of sustainable growth, and global sustainability. Thus,if buildings were RSI, it would be a shift in paradigm of how buildings are designed, build andused.Serious limitations on these notions are addressed. Buildings are large complex products realisedthrough complex processes and with a long lifecycle. It appears impossible that an entire buildingshould/could be radically new. How to evaluate radicality is a major challenge. It is tentativelyproposed, to use standards for sustainable office buildings. Standards are developed to accelerate thesustainable development but has to some extent come to constrain possibilities of radical innovation.As the criteria of newness is incorporated in standards, going beyond them, could be viewed as radical.Empirically a selection of international cases of office buildings with very high scores of BREEAM,LEED and DGNB are examined. Six selected cases were analysed more in detail, one ofthem,GeelensCounterflow’s Headquarters, being the most outstanding.This handful of office buildingshave reached remarkable higher level of sustainability than contemporary building regulations. Thereisindeed a gap between these few buildings and the majority, making them more radical, yet due toweak social sustainability, they are not evaluated as radical innovation.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

office building

Radical innovation

standards

sustainability

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kon (ämneskategori)

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