Development of a Holistic Environmental Brief For Use as a Design-phase Building Environmental Assessment Tool

The architectural brief is seen by architects as the most crucial part of the entire design process in terms of achieving high quality buildings. Environmental design strategies are considered as being of lesser importance[1]. It is proposed in this paper, that the use of an environmental brief to drive building design could be extremely effective in producing high environmental performance. Using the briefing stage to set out environmental criteria will allow the assessment of the building's performance throughout the various stages of the design process. This will be effective in ensuring that environmental design strategies are not compromised. The implementation of the environmental brief could be seen as more important in achieving a high level of environmental performance that the environmental design strategies themselves. Some case studies of house projects have been undertaken in which environmental briefs were developed. The paper examines the brief development process using these projects as examples. This brief development fits into a wider research framework of the development of design-phase environmental assessment tools.