Archinect - News

On the impact of newer buildings on urban air pollution

2024-10-25T17:47:00-04:00

In hermetically sealed buildings, less fresh air gets in. [...] Eventually, this polluted indoor air – which is making more than a third of the planet sick – is expelled into the surrounding environment. This raises the question of how buildings pollute the air around them, what pollutants they produce, and whether this expelled air is sufficiently diluted once outdoors.

As the article mentions, the World Health Organization had previously pointed to a "lack of monitoring of air pollution levels, sources and consequences on public health" as a present danger for cities.

To fix it, authors César Martín-Gómez and Arturo H. Ariño of the Universidad de Navarra say: "A detailed understanding of how buildings contribute to pollution in cities is essential. This will give public authorities, decision-makers and managers the tools to establish strategies to, for example, minimise pollution through devices similar to the catalytic converters required on all combustion-powered vehicles. Eventually, we may even be able to recover useful components of domestic air, such as waste methane, which could be redirected to energy generation."

You can read more about the compounding effects of poor indoor air quality via our 2021 feature on urban air pollution here.

60 Minutes spotlights the importance of indoor air quality

2023-10-31T14:50:00-04:00

For the Harvard professor, founder of the university's Healthy Buildings Program, our building design and public health officials have ignored indoor air systems for too long – that is, until the COVID pandemic hit. [...] "If you look at the way we design and operate buildings –and I mean offices, schools, local coffee shop[s] – we haven't designed for health," Allen said. "We have bare minimum standards."

Professor Joe Allen, who also does consultation work for developers, recently advised on the Amazon ‘HQ2’ project in Virginia from NBBJ. He and his colleagues at Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program center their work around six research areas (Homes, Schools, Business, Materials, Climate, and Infectious Diseases), noting that humans spend, on average, 90% of their lives indoors. The project leverages studies and empirical evidence that have roots in 19th-century public health design and is now being aided by research into the effects of ventilation on the spread of COVID-19.

"All else equal, which building are you gonna go to? You have your choice right now: This building that put in healthy building controls, or this building that's designed the way we've always designed buildings, and is prone to being a sick building?" Allen told 60 Minutes, speaking about post-pandemic market standards.

A list of tools and resources compiled for designers by the program can be found here.

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Investigating the hidden air pollution in our everyday indoor spaces

2019-04-08T16:07:00-04:00

House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry—was the world’s first large-scale collaborative investigation into the chemistry of indoor air. [...] The experiment’s early results are just now emerging, and they seem to show that the combined emissions of humans and their daily activities—cooking, cleaning, metabolizing—are more interesting, and potentially more lethal, than anyone had imagined.

In this New Yorker piece, writer Nicola Twilley observes one of the experiments of HOMEChem, who investigates the atmospheric chemistry of our indoor environments and how everyday activities can greatly affect its air quality.

“Dozens of the chemicals measured by the HOMEchem team are known to be harmful, and, as every scientist I spoke with mentioned, we spend almost all our time indoors, breathing them. Nonetheless, it is outdoor air-pollution levels that have been firmly linked to public health,” Twilley writes in the article.

MODU’s “Weather (Un)Control” exhibition explores the post-Sandy indoor air environment

2013-12-12T18:20:00-05:00

As America's East Coast continues to recover from Hurricane Sandy, MODU's recently completed "Weather (Un)control" exhibition of the Marfa Dialogues/NY highlights an overlooked issue of the storm's aftermath that still remains: the invisible contaminants in indoor air.

The installation features drawings made from artificial dust and static electricity to address the current shortsighted methods for indoor air quality inspection and a "right" to better indoor air.

Photos by Brett Beyer.

More info at Bustler.