Necessary conditions for multi-domain indoor environmental quality standards

Mahdavi, Ardeshir and Berger, Christiane and Bochukova, Veselina and Bourikas, Leonidas and Hellwig, Runa T. and Jin, Quan and Pisello, Anna Laura and Schweiker, Marcel (2020) Necessary conditions for multi-domain indoor environmental quality standards. Sustainability (Switzerland), 12 (20): 8439. ISSN 2071-1050

Abstract

A discussion of sustainability in architecture cannot be meaningfully carried out without the inclusion of most buildings’ central purpose, namely the provision of indoor environments that are accommodating of occupants’ needs and requirements. To this end, building designers and operators are expected to demonstrate compliance with codes and standards pertaining to indoor environmental quality (IEQ). However, the majority of conventional IEQ standards, codes, and guidelines have a single-domain character, in that they address IEQ in terms of a number of isolated domains (i.e., thermal, visual, acoustic, air quality). In this context, the present contribution explores the current state of multi-domain IEQ evaluation approaches and the necessary conditions for their further development and application. Toward this end, a number of common building rating schemes were selected and analyzed in detail. The results of this assessment imply the necessity of both short-term improvements of the existing schemes in terms of the transparency and plausibility of the applied point allocation and weighting strategies and the fundamental need for a deeper empirically grounded understanding of the nature of occupants’ perception of and behavior in the built environments.