to whether or not they will assume the added construction costs to achieve a sustainable

design. 2. What constraints do the decision makers face? Again, decision makers must

determine if long-run cost savings will outweigh the initial up-front investment in

sustainability. 3. What interaction exists? Designers with a vested interest in

sustainability should be on board from the beginning of the design phase in order to

ensure the most efficient usage of green building technologies and strategies. 4. What

information is beingprocessed and what is beingpredicted? At the design phase,

theoretical values are being processed to predict life-cycle savings. In the case of the

Rinker Hall model above, actual annual costs are used to provide evidence that the

savings do exist. 5. What adjusts to assure consistency? Adjustments for building

horsepower, and total hours of operation can be made in order to allow for even more

consistency.

 The stated hypothesis of the thesis poses the question of whether or not hard cost

data on resource consumption can be used to accurately evaluate green building

performance. Through taking into account all applicable costs and modification factors to

establish a methodology for comparison, the previous study showed that hard cost data

can in fact be a reliable predictor of building performance. The fact that hard cost data

alone nearly pays back the up-front expenditures before taking into account other factors

such as soft cost savings, community/environmental implications, and others proves that

substantial improvement in resource consumption hard costs are an effective display of

the greenness of a high performance building.

 Through conducting the literature review, it became apparent that there is a lack of

extensive data on actual performance for sustainable, high performance buildings. This is