One of the arguments advanced by citizens of our Boston suburb (Lincoln, Massachusetts) in favor of a $600/square foot renovation/reconstruction of the K-8 school (about $250,000/student, making it perhaps the most expensive school ever built in the United States) was that the 25-year-old windows in the classrooms and the exterior door from every classroom to the outside grass (single-story building) were leaky and prevented the building from reaching Net Zero nirvana. Without A/C in the classrooms, teachers had windows completely open for much of the year.
The construction project, contracted for at the very peak of the Boston real estate market, will commence in June 2020. (One argument by project proponents was that the vibrant local real estate economy would continue to expand forever, thus construction costs would rise at 5 percent forever, so we would be saving huge $$ by spending $110 million now.) The building shell will be sealed as tightly as possible and fresh air will be kept to the absolute minimum. Students will have to funnel in through one of a handful of exterior doors and funnel out through those same doors when school ends. Obstructing direct student egress from individual classrooms was sold as a defense against mass shooting. Apparently students are safer when trapped into their classrooms than they would be if they’d run 1/4 mile away.
I wonder if we have been and are building ourselves into a plague-friendly environment. Even with energy recovery ventilators, we still need to minimize fresh air in order to achieve Net Zero Nirvana. Green building advocates claim that somehow indoor air quality is actually higher in the latest green buildings, but perhaps they are comparing them to the failed Jimmy Carter-era energy crisis sealed office buildings (complete with plastic carpet emitting toxic fumes for decades!).
It is tough to believe that the new school, in which air gets in and out primarily via a handful of central pipes, will be as plague-resistant as the old school, in which every group of students had direct access to fresh air via a massive window bank and/or an open door.
As the U.S. population grows, thus packing a higher percentage of us into multi-family housing, and an ever-larger percentage of our buildings are designed for minimum energy consumption, will viruses end up being the primary beneficiaries?
Related:
- “LEED Building Standards Fail to Protect Human Health” (Yale): One of LEED’s major accomplishments — saving energy by making buildings more airtight — has had the paradoxical effect of more effectively trapping the gases emitted by the unprecedented number of chemicals used in today’s building materials and furnishings. … Programs such as LEED place relatively little emphasis on indoor air quality.
You don’t know much about energy recovery ventilation systems do you?