HFE in Green Buildings: Protocols and Applications

Green building rating tools are systems developed for fostering buildings stakeholders, professionals and consumers, to request, adopt and implement sustainable goals in the design of buildings. They focus on projects, and rate levels of their performance compliance with specific goals and requirements, considering the building’s life-cycle: from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition. While the certification methods vary across different rating tools, their common objective is that certified projects within these programs are conceived and designed to reduce the overall impact of the built environment both on the natural environment and, in theory, on the human health. Recent studies, based on a worldwide comparison of the main sustainable buildings rating tools, showed that human-related factors among assessment credits expressed in implicit and explicit terms, are limited and underweighted. Starting from these premises, the study is aimed to analyzing green buildings protocols applications by a human factor perspective. A review of 14 green high level certified realized buildings is presented, from an architectonic perspective, for understanding which explicit and implicit human-related points have been applied and how they have been translated in design features.