Evaluation of tall buildings within the context of sustainable design criteria

Buildings might cause environmental impacts through their life cycles. It is considered that tall buildings have much more environmental impacts than to low-rise buildings. In order to decrease these impacts ?carrier system design? and ?sustainable design? concepts come into prominence for tall buildings. Carrier system materials, carrier system types and energy isolation systems as part of carrier system design, and ecological, economical and social-cultural sustainable design criteria as part of sustainable design should be handled as a whole for the design of tall buildings. The implementation of sustainable design criteria, which were categorized by considering variously categorized sustainability criteria in different scientific researches and LEED assessment criteria, on 13 LEED certificated tall buildings were examined in this thesis. An evaluation method was suggested in order to determine the efficiency of the analyzed tall buildings according to sustainable design. The implementation success of ecological, economical and social-cultural sustainable design criteria for the analyzed tall buildings was evaluated in the context of the suggested evaluation method.Key Words : Tall building, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Design Criteria, LEED