Scholarly record

INDIRECT GREEN FACADE SYSTEMS: A PROPOSAL OF A GLOBAL PERFORMANCE INDICATOR FOR IN/OUT EVALUATION

Umberto Mecca

Abstract

All the recent studies about green buildings agree upon the importance of their envi-ronmental sustainability. This goal finds confirmation also through the recent green building assessment tools, which give higher rating points to environmental aspects of sustainability. Certainly the increase of buildings performances, thanks to an efficient use of energy, water and materials, or waste and CO2 emission reduction, is a tangible way to reduce environmental impact, but it couldn?t be enough in high-density urban ar-eas, where climate change due to global warming intensifies air pollution, surface tem-peratures and heat island effects (UHI). Therefore, each green building should enhance its environmental contribution, but only if it?s part of a well-balanced urban scale green planning, pointing to urban biodiversity enhancement, ecosystems protection and vegetation improvement as well. It?s not trivial at all to point out that facades are the visual and behavioral joining link between build-ings and the environment: from this perspective, facades need to take off their tradition-al function of partition between indoor and outdoor, to rather become an active and dy-namic interface capable to maximize environmental buildings performances. Even if there isn?t an explicit relationship between green building and ?vegetal skin?, Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) represent by now a recognized and strategic way to reduce the overall impact of the built environment, especially in urban areas that have typically limited availability of horizontal spaces at street level for urban greening. This paper highlights the advantages of Indirect Green Facades in both the cases of new and existing buildings, and proposes a global performance indicator for their evaluation. While green roofs are an established technology in construction and assessment of buildings, green facades still find difficult to develop. The introduction of a global per-formance indicator for Indirect Green Facades could encourage the adoption of this technology in urban regeneration actions, also for low quality building stock typically concentrated in suburban areas, to improve the city image as well. Hopefully, this indicator could be then implemented in several green building assess-ment tools and will contribute to spread the VGS culture.

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