BEAM Plus Interiors Manual

BEAM P

LUS

NTERIORS

OMMERCIAL

, R

ETAIL

NSTITUTIONAL

RAMEWORK

wider application.

Market Acceptance

For a voluntary scheme the extent to which performance can be

enhanced is determined by market acceptance of the assessment

criteria, BEAM’s track record, and the cost of undertaking assessment.

Judging from the number of projects certified the performance criteria

included in the various versions of BEAM have been both realistic and

attainable in practice.

1.6.5

SSESSMENT

RINCIPLES

According to international consensus [4, 6] building assessments should

be performance based as far as possible. Assessment needs to take a

holistic view of performance with the emphasis on life-cycle impacts.

Assessment purely on prescriptive features would preclude areas

without those features from obtaining a good result regardless of their

actual performance. Furthermore, assessments based on features

would only encourage feature-based design, construction and operating

practices.

Transparency

BEAM Plus recognises that assessment criteria and methods to achieve

compliance need to be transparent, providing details of the benchmarks

(baselines), data, assumptions and issues taken into account in the

assessments and the rating.

BEAM Plus Interiors, a first for BEAM, conducted an open, three month

consultation period (April-July 2013) when stakeholders, members of the

public, and professionals submitted comments.

Flexible and Objective

BEAM Plus embraces a wide range of projects, variable in terms of

scale, location and mix of uses (types of premises). The assessment

criteria and methods of assessment need to be flexible, and have

alternative means of compliance, yet are reasonably objective to enable

the Assessor to draw conclusions without undue delay or controversy.

Updates to Assessment Criteria

The BEAM Plus rating schemes are revised and updated from time to

time to reflect changes in industry standards and practices, findings from

Credit Interpretation Request, Circular Letters and other related

developments. Updates are issued as addenda to the rating system in

circulation at the time and incorporated into future revisions.

Where the criteria is revised or modified after the project has been

registered, the framework and credits that were current at the time of

registration shall prevail unless the Applicant wishes to embrace the

revisions and updates.

Special Cases

It is possible that some projects may not be fully embraced by the

criteria currently presented in this Manual, whether due to their unusual

nature or variety of forms and system designs, etc. In such

circumstances certain assessment criteria or the method of

demonstrating compliance may need to be modified. This requires

advance agreement between the Applicant and the BSL TRC.

Certification Upon Completion

A key principle of BEAM Plus rating tool, and its predecessors has

always been that certification is issued only upon completion of the

project, this helps to ensure that committed design features are actually

installed, that construction practices have met the required standards,