The construction of urban ecological buildings is the symbol of ecological urban sustainable development. High-rise buildings that signify the development level of cities are the most important type of urban ecological buildings. This paper emphasizes on the improvement of the quality of construction and reduction of resource consumption and energy waste in largescale construction including high-rise buildings in Mashhad metropolitan as the second metropolis in Iran. HQE (High Quality Environmental standard) refers to an international standard for sustainable and green architecture, and serves as a fundamental principle for design of high- rise buildings with emphasis on eco city theory in this paper. The comparison of three important and famous existing high-rise buildings in Mashhad according to designing principles of ecological high-rise buildings is the ultimate goal of this paper. The presented data in this paper relate to all towers of Mashhad metropolitan and the case studies are three towers of Baran, Armitaj and Darvishi Hotel. In this paper, using analytical and descriptive methods, 40 criteria, and 14 secondary targets in 4 basic target groups of "ecological construction", "ecological management", "Comfort" and "health" in two main groups of external and internal environment have been assessed and the final scores represent the level of greenness of buildings. Evaluation of completed questionnaires and interviews with managers, residents and a group of designing engineers indicate that almost none of the towers have considered the eco city principles and are non-ecological buildings. The implementation of a few criteria of HQE parameters in these towers are not due to the ecological thinking in construction but to show that these towers can provide distinguishable welfare for inhabitants compared to other buildings and also to construct a more expensive building to demand a higher price for sale. In order to improve the quality of high-rise buildings and further delineation of ecological thinking, we suggest considering all levels of management, planning and design of eco cities in construction of high-rise buildings

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