Taking the LEED
Singapore, 15th January 2010
Having your lighting design contribute to achieve a level of “green” classification is fast becoming a standard part of our activities. I would say that right now nearly 1/3 of our new projects require us to design towards compliance with LEED from the US or BCA’s Green Mark, etc. Specifically LEED requires quite a lot of paperwork.
But there are still a lot of questions about these new green standards and as a design community we are just starting to get to grips with what exactly is required. It appears that the guidelines to achieving these green standards are very area specific and thus we find many applications not really covered in terms of targets for lighting.
In one of our projects (railway train stations) we are confronted exactly with this issue. The client, being the governments transport authority, wants to achieve gold classification according to BCA’s Green Mark system, but found that the available descriptive guidelines do not really apply to the stations. So it has embarked to creating their own Green Mark guidelines specifically for this application which it will then submit to BCA for approval. I am sure that there are many other project applications that struggle to find ways to apply the relatively limited “green” guidelines to their situation.
While lighting is only a very small part of the overall LEED or Green Mark guidelines, it may be good for our lighting design industry to put our heads together and look at ways to develop one good common sense guideline for achieving green standards, rather than trying to comply with various different guidelines that originated from organizations with little affinity to lighting.
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