Synopsis: The Life Cycle of Building

This article focuses on the concept of "sustainability", which is currently an important issue in building construction around the world. It highlights the building construction processes in relation to environmental and health aspects. These processes aiming at making "Sustainable Building" are developed and employed mainly in many countries and particular in the Netherlands.

In an introductory part of the article, it states that knowledge on "Sustainable Building" is highly important and started a long time ago. However, the concept has been changing as time has changed. In the past, sustainable building involved the concept of survival. Sustainability was mainly about how to protect building against weather circumstances and dangerous animals. In this way, sustainability was fulfilled by producing and exploiting durable building materials. However, the process of producing and transporting raw materials (especially from a source far away) normally resulted in pollution and terrible effects to environment. This effect of the building activities was called the Sick Building Syndrome. As a result, the new concept of "Sustainable Building" has been developed in order to change human behaviour towards more balanced building circumstances. The concept of sustainability is known as "the Life Cycle of Building".

The Life Cycle of Building is rather complicated since it involves its technical structure in time and space as well as its social and economical importance (e.g. unemployment of large numbers of workers in the building and construction industry.). The keys to successful sustainable building and a Sustainable Development are co-operation, collaboration and teamwork and a proper choice of building materials such as using easy renewable materials or highly advanced materials in the smallest quantities and dimensions.

However, since the entire building process normally consumes energy and emits pollution, the solution to this problem is reuse or recycle. The Life Cycle of materials and products is applied for all kinds of proposes, including building. Therefore, partial demolition, renewal or refurbishment and the reuse of building materials are processes of sustainable development aiming at reducing the consumption of energy and minimizing the pollution, the world problems.

JOURNAL ARTICLE - Schmid, P 1999, The Life Cycle of Building, accessed on 23 September 2009, http://www.ba.itc.cnr.it/sksb/PAPERS/Key02.pdf.