Evolving green building: triple bottom line or regenerative design?

The research aims to envision the next generation green building. It starts from a critical review of green building concepts and practices. The critiques mainly come from two perspectives: one is triple bottom line and the other is regenerative design, which require that green building should take a holistic approach to sustainability as well as raise its benchmark. Revisiting green building rating systems (such as LEED), the article found that the green building concept and framework is being evolved to embrace sustainability critiques not in a way of bringing in more ambiguous, complicate indicators but through leverage, linkage and contextualization. This article also argues that the rhetoric debate on triple bottom line and regenerative design does not help to push forward building practices towards more sustainable built environments. It is more important to evolve the current engineering approach (thermal insulation and efficiency) to benchmarking and measuring building performance. An ecological approach (thermal dissipation and filtration) is anticipated for next generation green building practices. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.