Indoor Air Quality Factors in Designing a Healthy Building

Current guidelines for green buildings are cursory and inadequate for specifying materials and designing ventilation systems to ensure a healthful indoor environment, i.e. a “healthy building,” by design. Public perception, cultural preferences, litigation trends, current codes and regulations, rapid introduction of new building materials and commercial products, as well as the prevailing design-build practices, pose challenges to systems integration in the design, construction and operation phases of modern buildings. We are on the verge of a paradigm shift in ventilation design thinking. In the past, thermal properties of air within a zone determined heating, ventilating, and airconditioning (HVAC) specifications. In the future, occupant-specific and highly responsive systems will become the norm. Natural ventilation, displacement ventilation, microzoning with subfloor plenums, along with the use of point of source heat control and point of use sensors, will evolve to create a "smart" responsive ventilation-building dynamic system. Advanced ventilation design tools such as the modeling of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) will be used routinely. CFD will be integrated into air quality and risk assessment models. Introduction At the beginning of the 21 century, “green building design” can be seen as being at the confluence of emerging societal interests, all seeking to use resources wisely in the design of health-promoting environments. The last decade saw the concept of the “global village” emerge through terms such as “sustainable development,” “ecotourism,” “ecotaxation,” “socially responsible investment,” and “green architecture,” among others. Organizations representing private and public sector interests lay claim to these terms and attempt to establish the consensus to operational definitions, often suited to their perspective and constraints. Others are asking for a civil society that promotes social justice equality, and conservation through the actions of the public and private sectors. Green building concepts are simply a manifestation of these changes in our western society (1). Spengler, J.D. and Chen, Q. 2000. “Indoor air quality factors in designing a healthy building,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 25, 567-600.