BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) has been just finished for Geoppert-Mayer. The building has been awarded an „Outstanding” certificate as the first one in Poland. This is the highest possible mark to be achieved. Projects receiving this rating act as exemplars for the industry.
To certify a building at the Outstanding BREEAM rating level, the facility must achieve a final BREEAM score of at least 85%. Goeppert-Mayer obtained 86,39%. Every office building applying for the certificate within BREEAM Europe Commercial 2009 has to be assessed in compliance with several categories – management (up to 12% of the total score), health and wellbeing (up to 15%), energy (up to 19%), transport (up to 8 %), water (up to 6%), materials (up to 12,5%), waste (up to 7,5%), ecology and pollution (up to 10%) and innovation (up to 10%).
Buro Happold played a central role in achieving this certificte. The company was responsible for the certification assessment process and prepared the pre-assessment for the project. Right from concept phase the developer of the Goeppert-Mayer office building, which is situated within GPP Business Park in the Upper Silesia Industrial Park, decided to design a „green” building and that it should undergo BREEAM assessment, showing their commitment to sustainability and their awareness of the factors involved.
Goeppert-Mayer uses the tri-generation system to provide the simultaneous generation of cooling, heat and power which enables a significant reduction in the buildings’ operational costs and consequently has a direct impact on tenants’ leases. Thanks to the applied solutions Goeppert-Mayer saves up to 50 percent of energy that is used in a typical A-class office building. Running costs of the facility, including utilities, amount to EUR 1 per 1 sq. meter (one shift work).
BREEAM (Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method) is the world’s leading and most widely used environmental assessment method for buildings, with over 115 000 buildings certified and nearly 700 000 registered. The method was created in Great Britain in 1990 by the Building Research Establishment (BRE). It sets the standard for best practice in sustainable design and has become the de facto measure used to describe a building’s environmental performance. Credits are awarded in ten categories according to performance. These credits are then added together to produce a single overall score on a scale of Pass, Good, Very Good, Excellent and Outstanding. The operation of BREEAM is overseen by an independent sustainability board, representing a wide cross-section of construction industry stakeholders.
Goeppert-Mayer was delivered in 2012 and covers a total area of 7 800 sq. meters attracting such companies as Ericsson and ABB. This year, construction works on another two energy-efficient office buildings (Otto Stern and Kurt Alder) of GPP Business Park were launched. The facilities are to be finished in Q2 and Q3 of 2014 respectively. Otto Stern is already 80 percent pre-leased. The buildings are named after Nobel prize winners that came from the Upper Silesia region.