Healthy Buildings

There is an acceptance among healthcare professionals, architects, and engineers that human health is linked to the environment created and maintained in buildings people live and work in. Rather than an after-the-fact add-on feature of a building, healthy buildings are typically designed, constructed, and operated through an integration of materials and methods that manifest a physically healthy space. The fact that the EPA lists indoor air pollution as one of the top five environmental risks to public health suggests that there are far fewer healthy buildings than unhealthy buildings. So, how are healthy buildings designed?

Gail Vittori, of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, says:

Establishing life cycle health and environmental considerations as evaluative criteria for design decisions and material and product specifications yields measurable benefits in enhanced (hospital) patient outcomes, improved worker productivity, and reduced operations and maintenance costs, to name a few.

Her solution consists of the following ideas:

Redefining buildings through their life cycle as integral parts of a healthy regional ecosystem, and as environments that directly impact human health, are basic principles of green building. Minimizing wastes, pollution, and toxics associated with the construction and operation of buildings and pursuing every opportunity to optimize indoor environmental quality are measurable performance goals.

The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems identifies three components of a life-cycle assessment: upstream factors (i.e., off-site mining, manufacturing); on-site direct use (i.e., during construction, operation, and maintenance); and post-use (i.e., adaptive reuse, recycling, and disposal, either on-site or off-site).

Concerns about upstream factors include resource depletion / recycled content; biodiversity; climate change; public health; and occupational health and safety.

Concerns about on-site direct use include indoor environmental quality; energy efficiency; durability; occupant health and productivity; occupational health and safety; and ambient air quality.

Concerns about post-use include building adaptive re-use; materials reusability; materials recyclability; and materials safe disposal.

For more information on healthy buildings, visit the following websites: