Power your design

Advanced Buildings streamlines the integrated design process for you; placing a high performance building within your reach.

Today, buildings in the United States consume 35% of all energy used, and 65% of all electricity. They're also responsible for 35% of our carbon dioxide emissions.

This energy use costs more than $228 billion per year—25% of which is wasted due to poorly designed buildings and systems.

High performance buildings can help minimize this impact.

Banner photo: National Wildlife Federation Headquarters, Reston, Virginia. The design team used a rigorous-financial analysis to select "state of shelf" technologies and materials. Annual energy savings are 40 percent more than a traditional building design, or approximately $60,000 for this 95,000 sq. ft. building.
Photo credit: Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum

What is Advanced Buildings™?

Advanced Buildings is a suite of technical resources, trainings and information to improve the way buildings are designed, built and used. Using whole building patterns, design process tools, and education, it provides designers with the resources to incorporate integrated design strategies on their next project to reduce energy usage and improve indoor environmental quality. Advanced Buildings is compatible with both LEED™ and ENERGY STAR®.

What building types does Advanced Buildings address?

The program focuses on non-residential buildings ranging in size from 20,000 to 80,000 ft². Building types include office, educational, retail, grocery, medical clinics, commercial and industrial storage and other building types by specific systems.

Why these buildings?

This is a historically difficult to reach market due to the many different building types, their various design and construction processes and the fast pace of their design and construction schedules. Additionally, many efficiency programs have difficulty providing services to this market because they typically do not warrant full building simulation and yet have more energy savings potential than can be realized if simply upgrading individual technologies.

Who is the audience for this program and its resources?

The resources are specifically for the project design team and the owner. The various resources developed by Advanced Buildings address the specific needs of these audiences for the WHY, HOW and WHEN aspects. The resources are available for use and distribution by energy efficiency and environmental programs to help them in helping their customers.

Acknowledgements

Advanced Buildings is jointly developed by the New Buildings Institute and the Energy Center of Wisconsin through the support of the following sponsors: