Development of sustainable building standards: Next steps towards climate-friendly buildings in the City of Graz

To make efforts for climate protection in the City of Graz (Austria) as effective as possible, the city has established a climate protection fund, from which the KNB (Klimafreundliche und Nachhaltige Baustandards) project emerged. In the KNB project, a new approach was developed on how the city can already request and implement sustainability criteria for its public buildings in architectural competitions. This paper presents the methodology for evaluating the climate friendliness of building concepts based on the developed form “sustainability and climate protection”. Moreover, an evaluation algorithm for assessing the competition works and ranking the building concepts is presented. To demonstrate the applicability and validate the form and the evaluation algorithm, we applied the procedure to a real architectural competition. The results show that all participants were able to consider the required aspects and that the external experts for sustainability assessment were able to evaluate the competition works using the developed evaluation algorithm. The City of Graz set the goal to apply this methodology in all further architectural competition and thereby take a further step towards sustainable procurement of buildings.