Examination of Traditional Buildings in terms of LCA: LEED assessment of Diyarbakır Houses


Tuna Taygun G. (Executive), Vural S. M., Darçın P., Aykal F. D.

Project Supported by Higher Education Institutions, BAP Research Project, 2012 - 2015

  • Project Type: Project Supported by Higher Education Institutions
  • Support Program: BAP Research Project
  • Begin Date: November 2012
  • End Date: November 2015

Project Abstract

It is known that the processes of a building are determined by effects of the shape on interactions between environments of building.  Therefore, these effects gain importance during the evaluation of a building in terms of environment. In the world, there are many traditional settlements and buildings, which have been produced by public experience and qualified as eco-friendly in many scientific analyses. Nevertheless, it can be observed that modern design approaches have produced many buildings which have contributed to environmental problems. Attempts of decreasing the harm on the environment have generated certain popularized evaluation methods, one of which is LEED certification system produced by USGBC. LEED 2009 v.3 LEED for Homes basically questions the environmental effects of a residential building. In the research, three traditional houses of old Diyarbakır settlement, which has been proved to have successful environmental relations and architectural solutions, were evaluated. Although, it was assumed that these houses could have taken very high points due to their eco-friendly properties, the result of the evaluation revealed that, the houses cannot be graded with enough points to be certified. The main reasons of this outcome can be determined as inapplicability of existing evaluation systems to traditional buildings, the lack of regional and spatial architectural and eco-friendly solutions and and obligation of certain building products  in the coverage of these systems. Therefore, to recompose a new type of a properly organized, integrative and holistic evaluation method, which is applicable to traditional buildings, encounters different architectural solutions and evaluates according to a more balanced scoring system, is being proposed.