Sustainable Building: Developers and space users want more sustainable design in the office sector, writes John Mitchell

In 2004, according to a report by Jones Lang LaSalle, the top 10 new office schemes amounted to over 130,000sq m (1.4 million sq ft) of space. Few of these buildings had sustainability as a primary issue.

With sustainability being an enormous topic in housing, transport and indeed lifestyle, why has the office market been so slow to respond to the challenge?

While there has been a number of high profile office buildings with sustainable principles at their core, they have all been for owner-occupiers - almost all in the public sector. The truth is that office space in Ireland is - like housing - produced speculatively by developers. There has been little incentive for even top developers to consider sustainability issues in general, let alone energy costs or carbon emissions.

Property agents and large financial institutions - along with the developer themselves - are the key influences of this speculative market and they have been slow to embrace the sustainable agenda for a number of reasons.

However different they may look externally, speculative office buildings on the inside are essentially identical with raised floors and suspended ceilings allowing maximum flexibility. Sustainable buildings to date have not been as flexible and agents perceive them as dark, with grey concrete exposed ceilings and low ambient light levels.

Furthermore, while champions of sustainability will admit that capital costs for their buildings are higher, their claim that lifecycle savings more than pay for this often does not stand up to rigorous analysis.

On the other hand, quantity surveyors need to develop broader empirical measurement methods, which take account of issues like increased comfort, user satisfaction and, whisper it, the overall effect on the planet of sustainable buildings.

For instance, comprehensive research into thermal comfort, particularly in office environments, clearly indicates that the better a building can react to the occupiers own behaviour (opening windows, and so on), the larger the temperature range that the occupant will tolerate and, consequently, the lower the energy demands on the building will be.

Architects, too, who are anxious to design their buildings on sustainable principles have difficulty finding relevant hard information on strategies to employ and their cost and, as yet, there is no consensus on measurement criteria for properly assessing the overall "greenness" of a building.

The case for sustainability was not helped by the fact that some early champions have adopted a superior moralistic stance, often allied to a particular political viewpoint.

All of this is unfortunate, as the case for sustainability is clear. Things are about to change and change rapidly for a number of reasons.

For instance, economist Dan McLoughlin believes that the current rise in energy prices is a response to - not a short-term political crisis as before - a rocketing demand from the Chinese economy. It looks like higher energy prices are here to stay - oil prices jumped from below $45 a barrel to about $70 a barrel in 2005 and, at the time of writing, stand at $67 a barrel.

But, most importantly, starting in 2006, the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive will require that all buildings are energy rated. This rating must be displayed in the building for all to see. A prospective tenant or purchaser (often in the form of a fund manager) will now have a simple guide to the building's energy performance, as will an increasingly aware workforce. It would be a foolish tenant, leasing office space on a 20-year lease, who does not include sustainability on their selection criteria. In my view, buildings with poor energy ratings will become unlettable or unsaleable at normal commercial rents.

There is an increasing understanding among developers and large space users that buildings need to be more sustainable. At the British Council for Office conference in Paris recently, Mori presented a new poll of developers and large space users which reported that, not only were 94 per cent in favour of more sustainable buildings, but that over 60 per cent of them would pay more for sustainable buildings.

In the UK major occupiers and developers are producing their own policies on the matter. Renault has a guidance document for their facilities managers. Planners are beginning to play a role too. The issue is just on the radar in pre-planning consultations in Ireland but, in the UK, councils - like the City of Westminster - have produced supplementary planning guidance on sustainable buildings.

Perhaps the strongest indication that the labelling of buildings will have an effect is the experience with fridges. While most believe that fridges with unfavourable energy ratings disappeared due to a lack of demand, research has shown that it was the fear of losing market share by manufacturers which actually led to their disappearance. They simply stopped making them. Fear is the key.

John Mitchell is an architect in private practice with Duffy Mitchell O'Donoghue. He specialises in office design, especially office interior architecture