Research Project: Work aid for adaptation of BNB – development of a work aid for the application of the BNB to construction measures for which no system variant exists

Project briefing

• Status Completed
• Project duration August 2018 – November 2019
• Programme Future Building

The Sustainable Building Assessment System (BNB), which has been in use since 2011 for the holistic consideration and assessment of sustainability aspects for buildings, was expanded in 2013 to include "analogous application". This scope of application is to be expanded to include individual building measures. The BNB adaptation tool developed in the project aims to simplify the evaluation rules for the practical application of the BNB.

Background

The Sustainable Building Guide and the BNB are now established as requirements in federal construction by ministerial decrees, and the first practical experience has been gained with around 30 building certifications. Of the currently more than 7,000 federal construction measures and the 500 civil construction measures contained therein with investment costs of over 2 million Euros, more than 60 projects are in a BNB application with certification.

According to the Federal Building Authorities, a further 270 projects are based on the specifications of the BNB within the framework of a so-called "analogous application". With the regulations for "analogous application", it is possible to replace missing or unsuitable assessment criteria for the building type with substitute procedures and, as a rule, with simplified forms of verification, whereby the essential protection goals should remain addressed.

In the case of construction projects in which the BNB has to be adapted to the framework conditions of the respective measure on a project-specific basis, various implementation issues arise for the staff of the federal building authorities. These questions result from the mix of different uses, from uses for which there are not yet any valuation rules and construction measures with varying degrees of intervention.

Objective

The work aid "BNB adaptation" is intended to simplify the evaluation process and to increase the scope of the BNB. It is intended to provide simplified evaluation rules for application to a large part of all civil federal construction projects, including selected individual construction projects and to explain their use in the evaluation process.

The contractor of the research project was FBNB Forschung und Beratung Nachhaltiges Bauen, Dipl.-Ing. Bernd Landgraf with the participation of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörn Krimmling.