Beyond the Visual: Operationalising Cultural Sustainability as a Measurable Pillar of Sustainable Interior Design in the Context of the United Arab Emirates

Sustainable building assessment has traditionally focused on measurable environmental performance indicators such as energy efficiency, material selection, water consumption, and indoor environmental quality. While these metrics have advanced the sustainability agenda, cultural sustainability remains inconsistently represented and weakly operationalised within dominant green building assessment frameworks. Existing approaches tend to address culture indirectly through broad social sustainability criteria, such as community engagement, inclusivity, and heritage preservation, while overlooking the ways in which cultural values are experienced, maintained, and expressed within interior environments. Consequently, the cultural performance of buildings remains difficult to evaluate despite growing recognition of culture as a fundamental pillar of sustainability.

This paper argues that interior design, through its influence on materiality, spatial organisation, and occupant experience, offers a critical yet underexplored avenue for integrating cultural sustainability into building performance assessment. Addressing the question of how cultural values can be more effectively incorporated into sustainable building evaluation, the study investigates LEED-certified multipurpose buildings in the United Arab Emirates, a context where rapid urban development intersects with strong cultural traditions and social practices.

Using a qualitative methodology comprising case studies and semi-structured interviews with building occupants, the paper explores how users perceive, experience, and preserve cultural values within sustainable interior environments. The findings are used to identify recurring cultural indicators that are insufficiently captured by current certification systems. Based on these insights, the paper proposes a framework for assessing cultural sustainability within interior spaces, enabling cultural considerations to be evaluated alongside environmental criteria in sustainable building performance assessment. In doing so, the study contributes to ongoing discussions on cultural sustainability and demonstrates how interior design can support a more holistic and context-sensitive approach to sustainable building practice.