Performance Of Buildings And Serviceability Of Facilities

This paper summarizes the keynote addresses and panel discussions at the ASTM symposium. The development since World War II of standards for the behavior in service of a building as a whole, or of the building components, is described. The role of ASTM Committee E06 on Performance of Building Constructions, is outlined. The need for standards as an aid to facility management is presented. Terminology is clarified. Durability and service life are considered. Standards for building performance and serviceability are described. Needs for standards are summarized.

In 1986, the FFC requested that the NRC appoint a committee to examine the field and propose ways by which the POE process could be improved to better serve public and private sector organizations. The resulting report, Post-Occupancy Evaluation Practices in the Building Process: Opportunities for Improvement, proposed a broader view of POEs-from being simply the end phase of a building project to being an integral part of the entire building process. The authoring committee recommended a series of actions related to policy, procedures, and innovative technologies and techniques to achieve that broader view. In 2000, the FFC funded a second study to look at the state of the practice of POEs and lessons-learned programs among federal agencies and in private, public, and academic organizations both here and abroad. The sponsor agencies specifically wanted to determine whether and how information gathered during POE processes could be used to help inform decisions made in the programming, budgeting, design, construction, and operation phases of facility acquisition in a useful and timely way. To complete this study, the FFC commissioned a set of papers by recognized experts in this field, conducted a survey of selected federal agencies with POE programs, and held a forum at the National Academy of Sciences on March 13, 2001, to address these issues. This report is the result of those efforts.

During planning and design of a facility, its performance and serviceability should be considered for its entire service life. The structure or shell should be planned for 50 or more years even if the building systems and internal fittings will be retrofitted in half that time. The need for rigorous evaluation of all components on a life-cycle basis is described, as applied to facilities that can cope with change: the technologies of 25 years hence cannot be predicted, churn rates are increasing, hitherto unrecognized environmental impacts must be avoided or mitigated, and external economic and regulatory constraints are increasingly burdensome. In this context, ownership is compared to leasing. The need for a building history and facility program are discussed.

The design, construction, operation, and retrofit of buildings is evolving in response to ever-increasing knowledge about the impact of indoor environments on people and the impact of buildings on the environment. Research has shown that the quality of indoor environments can affect the health, safety, and productivity of the people who occupy them. Buildings are also resource intensive, accounting for 40 percent of primary energy use in the United States, 12 percent of water consumption, and 60 percent of all non-industrial waste. The processes for producing electricity at power plants and delivering it for use in buildings account for 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. federal government manages approximately 429,000 buildings of many types with a total square footage of 3.34 billion worldwide, of which about 80 percent is owned space. More than 30 individual departments and agencies are responsible for managing these buildings. The characteristics of each agency's portfolio of facilities are determined by its mission and its programs. In 2010, GSA's Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings asked the National Academies to appoint an ad hoc committee of experts to conduct a public workshop and prepare a report that identified strategies and approaches for achieving a range of objectives associated with high-performance green federal buildings. Achieving High-Performance Federal Facilities identifies examples of important initiatives taking place and available resources. The report explores how these examples could be used to help make sustainability the preferred choice at all levels of decision making. Achieving High-Performance Federal Facilities can serve as a valuable guide federal agencies with differing missions, types of facilities, and operating procedures.

This book focuses on spearheading the integration of maintainability and green facility management right from the design stage. The text introduces the concept of green maintainability, and discusses considerations to maximize the performance by achieving resource and energy efficiency, while minimizing the total life cycle cost in embodied energy; environmental impact and consumption of matter/energy throughout the life cycle of a facility, by "doing it right the first time". In this edition, existing chapters have been brought up to date, to include contemporary sustainability concerns, such as: sustainability design, construction and materials, and maintainability of green features. Maintainability of Facilities is written for practitioners and students in architecture, engineering, building, real estate, construction, project management, facilities management, quantity and building surveying.

The quality of measurements needed to improve the performance of buildings and the serviceability of facilities inhere not in the measurements themselves but in their suitability to the needs of diverse and transitory participants in the development, design, construction, management and operations of buildings and facilities. Users must articulate their needs and metrological development will follow. A measurement development sequence is suggested: naming, ordering and scaling the variables of interest. Paper includes discussion of metrological history and measurement theory.

More than 30 federal departments and agencies with a wide range of missions and programs manage large inventories of facilities, also called portfolios. These portfolios range in size from a few hundred to more than a hundred thousand individual structures, buildings, and their supporting infrastructure. They are diverse in terms of facility types, mix of types, and geographic dispersal. For federal senior executives, facilities portfolio-related decisions revolve around the allocation of resources (staff, funding, time) for acquisition, renovation, operation, repair, and disposition of facilities. To make informed decisions, senior executives require information that will allow them to answer such questions as: What facilities do we have? What condition are they in? What facilities are needed to support the organization's missions? This study lays out a framework for developing and evaluating trends in facilities portfolio conditions, investments, and costs and identifies a set of key indicators that can be used to track performance over time. Some of the indicators are currently in use in some federal agencies; others will need to be developed.