Sustainable Design, Construction, Refurbishment and Restoration of Architecture: A Review

Considering the serious challenges our planet is facing, the building environment and construction sector must minimize their high negative impacts and maximize their contribution to sustainability. Many alternatives could promote this change, but to effectively optimize our architecture, we must take the step of quantifying and qualifying the sustainability of our constructions by choosing the best assessment alternative in each case. Many assessment methodologies and tools exist and there have been numerous reviews of them. The main objective and novelty of this review is to present an updated critical overview of all the sustainability evaluation alternatives developed in research studies in the fields of architectural design, construction, refurbishment and restoration. To achieve this, the analysis follows a specific methodology based on recent similar reviews. The result is a database with 1242 eligible documents analyzed in this review and attached as supplementary material available for future studies. As a main conclusion, rating tools and life cycle methods were found to be the most commonly applied methodologies, while the most recent tendencies use combined methods and probabilistic scenarios. This review could be useful to move towards a more sustainable building environment.