LEED® is a North American system created to assess sustainability parameters in buildings. It is managed by USGBC®, that was formed in the early 1990s. LEED®’s technical aspects are examined in order to clarify its operation premises, following the research hypothesis that these premises would have impact in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism, especially in their design strategies. Therefore, the thesis inquires the system in five parts. In the first part, it is reported the system’s history by means of identifying the agents involved in its formation and the positions disputed at that time. In the second part, it is carried out a conceptual elucidation of LEED® by means of establishing the references used by its founders, including it in the discussion of ecological modernization and ecocapitalism. In the third part, LEED®’s architectural and urbanistic impacts are formulated. On the one hand, the impacts are virtual – that is to say, they are related to the horizon of design potentialities implicit to LEED® -, while on the other hand they are empirical, an aspect that is detailed using two clusters of buildings located in marginal Pinheiros, in São Paulo, certified by LEED® Core & Shell. In the fourth part, the same methodology is applied, but this time to LEED® for Neighborhood Development. At last, in the fifth part, the connections between patterns and the architectural and urbanistic production of global cities are formulated. The research findings revealed how LEED® Core & Shell may support certain features of the North American corporate tower, how LEED® for Neighborhood Development sets the New Urbanism in a technical pattern and how the market may stress architectural and urbanistic questions in order to fulfill non-environmental design criteria. LEED® is read as a technology of neoliberalism, as it underlies global financial exchanges by offering parameters for the comparability between projects and mensuration of their features.