Three critical reviews were made on three different writings.

 

The first one is a review on article titled “Towards a more holistic approach to reducing the energy demands of dwellings” written by André Stephan, Robert H. Crawford, and Kristel de Myttenaere. The article is a critique that common energy assessment covers only a small part of total energy use within a building life cycle. The author argued that complete assessment method including assessment on indirect energy consumption is required to get a holistic view. This indirect energy consumption refers to embodied energy and transport energy (energy spent by the building inhabitants to commute from and to the assessed building).

 

The study conducted assessment of Life Cycle Energy (LCE) demands in two case studies: suburban and city context. The LCE comprises of three components, which are: Life Cycle Operational Energy (LCOE), Life Cycle Embodied Energy (LCEE), and Life Cycle Transport Energy (LCTE). Despite its goal to develop a holistic assessment, the study itself did not include public transport into their calculation. An important point that I made as a review on this article is related to possibility of discrepancies related to limitations of research and scope of assessment on two different sectors (buildings and transportation). The article itself doesn’t mention anything CO2e emissions caused by energy generation whereas CO2e emission is the cause of Global Warming Potential (GWP) environmental impact category.

 

Second review is a response to article titled “Benchmarking building performance: what can we learn from LEED?” written by Dr Jeroen van der Heijden from Australian National University. The article is an assessment and personal view of the author on Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) rating system. My concern is related to the author’s interpretation of rating tools as commodity. It’s a product that can be marketed and competed in different parts of the world. Here, the author misses an important point on adaptability of these rating tools to local context. A rating tool developed in a place could not be applied directly to different place with different context.

 

The third review is on David Baggs’ article titled “Beyond Carbon Neutrality: Strategies for Reductive and Restorative Sustainability”. This is an article on the importance of doing “good” rather than “less bad”. From this article, I learned that the concept of competing logics of sustainability proposed by Guy and Farmer in 2001 is not always working the way it was written. The logics are in fact not always competing; they can also be supporting one another.

 

These critical reviews are early assignments of this course. From this exercise, I learned how to use my own knowledge and apply it to the context of the reviewed articles. I learned how to use other opinions on the same topic, compare it against the idea presented in the articles and synthetise them to create a new understanding and approach.

 

My full reviews on these three articles can be downloaded here.