1 Investigation of sustainability and resilience characteristics of buildings including existing and potential assessment metrics V. Hasik 1 , J. P. S. Chhabra 2 , G. P. Warn 2 , M. M. Bilec 1 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 153 Benedum Hall, 3700 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261, United States 2 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, United States ABSTRACT Environmental and social issues related to the built environment have prompted discussions about sustainability and resilience of infrastructure. Buildings in particular are a major consumer of energy and material resources and can be vulnerable to natural and man-made hazards. Poor performance of a building in a number of areas, like structural integrity and energy use, can result in disruption to the regular functioning of the building and communities, and additional resource consumption and impacts associated with operation, maintenance, and repairs. This study explored the current literature and consensus regarding sustainability and resilience of buildings, covering the background of sustainability and resilience, including respective definitions, characteristics, theories, and interactions between the two. The study then examined current approaches for assessing and enhancing sustainability and resilience of buildings, with particular attention to life cycle assessment, green building rating systems, building codes, and performance-based earthquake engineering assessments. It also explored resilience assessments and strategies applied at the community scale and their relation to buildings. Factors and metrics considered in the various assessment frameworks are then used to form a new hybrid framework allowing for the comparison of sustainability and resilience of buildings. The culmination of the study is an example of a proposed set of sustainability and resilience metrics spanning areas of resource efficiency, service provision, site impacts, indoor environment, and structural integrity, with each of the areas further including a subset of factors contributing to the perceived performance of a building. The proposed metrics present a novel approach to the study of tradeoffs between designs for sustainability and resilience. INTRODUCTION Unsustainable consumption of resources, environmental pollution, and changing climate have all been factors in initiating many discussions about sustainable development over the past decades. Buildings in particular play a major role in sustainable development as the prime consumers of energy and material resources (Ruuska and Häkkinen 2014). Operation of buildings in the U.S. is responsible for consuming 39% of energy, 12% of water, 72% of electricity, and emitting 38% of carbon dioxide (EIA 2015; Maupin et al. 2014). These statistics have been on the forefront of building research and have fueled the development of better technologies