TQB - Total Quality Building Assessment
The Austrian Sustainable Building Council (ASBC) uses the TQB assessment scheme for the following reasons:
- The Austrian Institute for Ecology and the Austrian Institute for Building Biology and Ecology provide the ASBC with a free TQB.2010 version, which was fully revised as part of an extensive R&D project.
- The two founding institutes also introduced the assessment scheme with a free online assessment tool.
- This assessment tool has several modules. Using a user-friendly editing system, TQB can continually be adapted and further developed – only very little maintenance and programming efforts required.
- Designed in 2002, TQB has been a comprehensive building assessment scheme ever since, which is referred to as the second generation building assessment system. The TQB content is fully compatible with international norms (e.g. CEN TC350), these are currently being developed.
- TQB provides a comprehensive solution for building assessment in Austria, both in terms of content and technology. Content-related developments are solely performed by the Austrian Sustainable Building Council and its members; technical updates can be done cost-effectively.
- Both the Austrian construction industry and ASBC members profit from the resulting independence with regard to strategy and technology. As a result of the independence, costs for building assessments can be kept very low.
These points (i.e. advantages) can be used effectively by the ASBC in order to act as an attractive umbrella organisation both nationally and internationally, and work to support quality assurance for sustainable building.
Partnerships as the one with ASBC can involve knowledge transfer in general and it may provide a free building assessment scheme. For example, the building assessment is going to be translated in order to create networks internationally. Those interested will thus find it much easier to adopt the system for their own purposes.
The Austrian Sustainable Building Council’s goal is to support the idea of an Open Source Community in the field of sustainable building, and to clearly differentiate itself from high-cost franchise concepts.
