Silver and Gold Leed Commercial Interiors: Certified Projects

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Commercial Interiors (LEED-CI) is more relevant to interior design, which, according to the sharing layer concept, differs from exterior design (which is usually evaluated with the LEED New Construction sub-scheme). LEED-CI requires separate empirical analyses of LEED-CI certified buildings to further improve this sub-scheme. Therefore, in this study, Silver and Gold projects certified under LEED-CI-2009 in 14 US states were considered. Three project performance analyses, (i) certification, (ii) category, and (iii) cross-certification, were studied. The following results were revealed: (i) the range of the medians for Silver- and Gold-certified projects were 51–57 pts and 62–71 pts, respectively; (ii) in both Silver- and Gold-certified projects, Sustainable Sites (SS), Water Efficiency (WE), and Innovation in Design (ID) were the best-performing; Energy and Atmosphere (EA) and Indoor Environmental Quality (EQ) were intermediate-performing; and Material and Resources (MR) was the worst-performing categories; and (iii) in Silver-Gold cross-certification, category-focused (in 10 of 14 states) and category-unfocused (in four of 14 states) strategies were determined; in the category-focused strategy, the highest popular category was EA; the intermediate popular categories were WE, MR, and ID; and the lowest popular category was SS. Pooling all projects and all states into one frame can lead to the obscurement of the actual LEED-CI-2009 strategy(ies) in the transition from Silver to Gold certification in the US.