Building standards, regulations and labelling schemes are instruments for reducing energy demand and carbon emissions, linking policy ambitions to market-based responses. In practice, their effects are complicated. In this paper we show how 'market standards' in the office sector are fostering escalating energy demand and favouring building designs increasingly disconnected from changing user needs. In 'black boxing' ideas about needs, standards powerfully and dangerously stabilize, and often escalate, concepts of…