Beyond the Horizon
1998 to 2016: Awareness to adoption
LEED was developed in the late 1990s as a way to engage design teams and building owners in a new approach to the design and operations of new buildings and major retrofits. LEED was a menu of ideas that could be used by a project team for their specific project to achieve various levels of certification. Unique in its approach, LEED was extremely simple and applied to many different building types. The first version of LEED was 37 pages, with a group of things that were required for each project and a checklist of ideas, or credits, for the project team to achieve. Each idea, or credit, had three main components: an intent, a requirement and a submittal. There were requirements for every project and there were credits. And, utlimately, the more credits achieved, the greener the building.