We recently authored an article that was published in Facility Executive magazine. An introduction to the article is copied below. To see the full article, please visit the Facility Executive website here.
Today’s buildings are designed to be high-performance places for high-performance people, but they frequently fall short of their goals. A 2008 seminal study¹ by L.T. Kohn, “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” examined human error in the medical field and found that almost 100,000 people die every year from preventable medical mistakes. Chief among them? Human error.
We are seeing similar issues with buildings, and, in particular, LEED certified buildings. A 2010 New Buildings Institute report² found nearly 50% of LEED buildings didn’t achieve their Energy Use Intensity (EUI). While blame was assigned to things like poor modeling and poor construction controls, subsequent research discovered the real culprit: Humans.