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Although social, economic, and cultural indicators are of substantial importance to the concept of sustainable building, this concept is usually related to environmental characteristics. Any building level assessment method is complex and involves contradictory aspects. Moreover, emphasizing qualitative criteria only increases confusion. R&D and standardization are thus concentrated to transparency and usability of the environmental methods. Other directions of research aim at performance-based design and methods to take regional and cultural aspects into account. In this paper, the perspectives of the sustainability assessment of a whole building are presented, based on a state of the art, feasibility study on performance analysis and the development of an extended life-cycle assessment for buildings. Using various tools, and based on the case studies of building sustainability assessment, environmental indicators were often shown to be of lesser importance than the other, soft ones. The first steps in the development of a building sustainability assessment method for Portuguese residential buildings will be presented and discussed in the end

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A B S T R A C TThe construction industry is responsible for various negative impacts on the environment leading to an increasing demand for sustainable buildings. There are several Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA) methods that allow designers to assess and optimise the building sustainability level. Due to the potential of Building Information Modelling (BIM), the opportunity for BSA methods to adopt and benefit from BIM arises. Despite the benefits in the approach simplification for assessing building sustainability, so far the method has not been used comprehensively in the evaluation process. This paper analyses how using BIM can contribute to optimising BSA methods, focusing on the SBTool PT -H. BIM applicability is assessed and a framework for a BIM-based application -SBTool BIM -is proposed. BIM is still not oriented to sustainable building, but it has great potential. For the SBTool PT -H, results show that it is possible to directly and indirectly assess 24 out of 25 criteria using BIM. veloped all over the world by private companies and public https://doi.