What is Sustainable Building

The client’s role in leading the change in the construction industry has been widely perceived as crucial and, on the theme of sustainable building, it is advocated that clients must play their role to lead in engaging industry stakeholders in managing sustainable performance of construction projects. In essence, it is the client that makes the initial decision to procure construction works and the way in which procurement takes place. This influences the degree of environmentally-friendly (or sustainable) practice that is implemented in a project. For most building owners and property developers, this decision is affected by cost. A proposed rule-based system that contains decision-support rules pertaining to the assessment of (whole-life) cost implications for building projects is described in this chapter. The system is to be developed to meet the assessment criteria of Singapore’s BCA Green Mark Scheme and to support the use of BIM for designing energy efficient buildings and beyond.