BUILDING MAINTENANCE: A PATH TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY

This paper explores the potential of building maintenance as one of many ways to advocate
sustainability in the built environment in particular during the building operation. The first
objective is to provide an overview of the sustainability issues and building maintenance
through literature and theory reviews. The second objective is to analyse building defects in
the Malaysian university campuses. And this is achieved through questionnaire survey. The
questionnaires were administered on 50 university maintenance organizations. With a 66%
response rate, the findings suggest that some defects require maintenance urgently than the
others and on the basis of which it is concluded that resources should be directed to the more
urgent ones while the less urgent ones could be included in the subsequent maintenance rolling
programme (i.e. planned maintenance). The research found that lift failure, faulty electrical
systems and roof damages were the defects that respondents considered extremely urgent to
maintain. Defect analysis is significant for universities to be seen as a role-model in advocating
sustainable maintenance management system for their buildings and engineering services.
Keywords: Defects, University Buildings, Maintenance Management, Sustainable Building