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It¡¯s important for building owners and lessees to understand what makes a healthy building, how to get it certified, and how to keep it healthy in the long term. As well as the relationship between design and performance testing. The better they understand healthy buildings, the more likely they will be to build or retrofit them to promote wellness. Ideally, this results in better buildings and healthier, happier occupants.

Real estate could be an unlikely health booster for people.

What makes a building healthy?

When we talk about healthy buildings, we¡¯re really talking about buildings that promote human health. Here is a quick look at four elements of a healthy building.

Air quality: Poor air quality claims the lives of 7 to 8 million people around the world each year. Poor indoor air quality contributes to up to half of those deaths. Particulate matter, including soot from fires, causes most indoor air quality-related deaths. But unhealthy volatile organic compounds (VOCs) also contribute.

The materials you find inside a room influence the quality of its air. This includes the furniture, the paint on the walls, and the interior finishes. All these elements can emit unhealthy compounds, like VOCs.

On the plus side, rooms with good ventilation, air-filtration systems, and access to fresh air with operable windows have healthier air. And these days, designers can choose furniture and finishes with low emissions.

shows that better indoor air quality can sharpen decision-making and enhance cognitive abilities.

Water Quality: A healthy building should provide clean and safe water. What influences the quality of water that reaches building users? Everything from the quality of the source, the condition and kind of plumbing used, water pressure, and water temperature.

Lighting: Natural light is good for humans. Research shows us that adequate natural and artificial lighting benefits occupant health and productivity. When designers allow the sun to illuminate interiors, they are ¡°daylighting¡± a space. Research shows that daylighting improves learning outcomes and helps human health. And the various building standards¡ªWELL Building Standard, CHPS (Collaborative for High Performance Schools), and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)¡ªreward projects with daylighting.

Comfort, thermal, and acoustic: Healthy buildings have comfortable temperature and humidity levels. They also have systems or passive design features that manage thermal comfort. And healthy buildings manage noise levels in their spaces to make them acoustically comfortable places.

Air, water, light, sound, and temperature are the basics of a healthy building. WELL takes it further.

What is the WELL Building Standard?

The WELL Building Standard looks at buildings from a human health perspective. WELL ¡°applies the science of how physical and social environments affect human health, well-being, and performance.¡± It measures, certifies, and monitors aspects of the built environment that impact human health and well-being. The WELL Building Standard outlines key building-level and organizational strategies across 10 core concepts:

• Air
• Water
• Nourishment
• Light
• Movement
• Thermal comfort
• Sound
• Materials
• Mind
• Community

As a practice with a long history working in WELL, we understand building health from many perspectives: design, certification, compliance, monitoring, and maintenance. And we see WELL¡¯s value as an industry standard.

Our Carbon Impact Team often designs or retrofits buildings for WELL Building Standard and other certifications. We have a deep understanding of how a building, and its systems, can contribute to or detract from human health. We customize digital tools to model building views, daylighting, and other aspects that contribute to building health. We also do third-party WELL Performance Testing.

Jeremy has a long relationship with WELL. He helped write the WELL Performance Verification Guidebook that defines the work WELL Performance Testing agents perform. He also instructed the first WELL Performance Testing Agent training. Some of the tools Jeremy built for the original Performance Testing provider are still being used today.

Confirming your building health has a design benefit

WELL Performance Testing is worth it for two main reasons. If you want WELL certification, you need it. But the real benefit is that in performance testing you are proving that the design does what it was intended to do: that digital models for daylight simulation, for example, delivered. It¡¯s about capturing data at one point in time to prove that, yes, the lighting delivers the amount of luminance that we expected. The air quality is within the parameters we expected. And so on. It validates the design and construction efforts on newer buildings. On existing buildings, it helps owners identify issues that need to be addressed to get to health.

But the WELL performance tester can sometimes bring bad news.

On one of Jeremy¡¯s first jobs, he was performance testing for an organization that certified buildings and discovered that the area in their office with the worst VOCs was inside a pod of four cubicles. At the center of the pod was a whiteboard, a popular place for team brainstorming. Those whiteboard markers emit particulate matter, especially unhealthy VOCs. While a whiteboard might be a useful tool, it¡¯s much worse than a blackboard for human health.

So, what are the basics of healthy building design and retrofitting?

Healthy buildings start in the design stage. A design that prioritizes wellness puts a new building on the right track for WELL Building Standard or similar certification.

For example, we analyzed various design solutions for a multi-school project in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which included Logan Elementary School and others. The goal was to see which design offered the best daylighting for occupants. We created a custom script to analyze the availability of views in the digital model.

Our team tried several design approaches to improve daylighting and luminance in the classrooms and the gyms. We chose tubular daylighting devices to improve daylight saturation at Lakewood Elementary and Thurston Elementary. Tubular daylight devices allow light to penetrate a building more deeply. We are looking at applying TDDs in passageways, too, to light the paths where people walk. The projects pursued a CHPS certification.

Long-term building health requires future proofing. WELL Building Standard rewards strategies that stay effective in the long term. For example, by prioritizing daylight you¡¯ve got a space that still gets light when the power goes out versus a dark box. And operable windows are rewarded, too, compared to mechanical ventilation, which needs power to work.

Can we design buildings so they can pivot to health as conditions change? Increasingly, we are being asked to design for long-term building health. This can mean using strategies that allow owners to update systems to maintain comfort and air quality.

We designed South Niagara Hospital to be pre-certified for WELL Building Standard. Our team led the planning, design, and compliance team (with many procedures in place to maintain impartiality).

The owner applied for WELL Building Standard pre-certification to show its commitment to wellness, which required documenting the building¡¯s WELL features during design development. The owner also wanted to the building to achieve WELL Building Standard recertification after the three-year certification cycle expired.

The challenge was how to sustain WELL quality indoor air with the anticipated outdoor air composition changes. They asked for solutions to maintain ambitious standards for air quality and occupant health. The mechanical team designed the hospital to house various advanced filters that could be used to adapt to environmental conditions as they change. Pre-certified in 2024, SNH is on track to be Canada¡¯s first WELL-certified hospital.

Monitoring and maintenance can help owners keep buildings healthy. Advanced sensors allow owners and operators to continuously monitor building conditions. One example is indoor air quality sensors. Monitors can show us when something is not working as it should.

For example, in the summer of 2025, Canadian wildfires were affecting the air quality in the Upper Midwest of the US. We had done WELL Performance Testing on multiple buildings for an owner/operator in Wisconsin, which gave the owner a baseline for building performance. During the wildfires, the owner expected that their filtration systems would handle the particulates without a problem. They checked their indoor air quality sensor data to make sure. They discovered two buildings in the same area were getting wildly different results. One had very high levels of particulates in its air. They verified the data and checked the site. The facility engineer found that a worn filter housing gasket in one building was letting in unfiltered air.

We can do full testing even for the criteria the monitors will cover, which can confirm that monitors are working. We can also identify monitors that need calibration.

Some unhealthy buildings need more help than others. When testing shows a building is unhealthy, intervention may be necessary. In the field, we have seen buildings with constant issues with particulate matter levels showing up in WELL Performance Testing. A building might require multiple high-volume air flushes to bring particulate levels down to achieve WELL Building Standard certification. Indoor air quality monitors can help the owner check the appropriate clean air delivery rates.

Older buildings may have major issues that demand more than a targeted intervention to achieve WELL Building Standard. A technology company in a rehabbed mid-rise office building in Washington state sought WELL certification. But an earlier building fit-out project failed to investigate for asbestos. The WELL Building Standard requires asbestos mitigation to protect occupants.

We were hired to help achieve WELL, and we showed that the asbestos testing, though it would take time, was necessary to get certification. The project was able to get a WELL certification, but if we had been brought in earlier, we could have advised on site selection and asbestos remediation.

Maintenance for building health never ends

Achieving a healthy building certification like WELL Building Standard is a significant milestone, but it shouldn¡¯t be the end of the story.

Building health is not a one-time achievement; it¡¯s an ongoing commitment. Buildings require preventive care and maintenance to remain healthy over time. They need regular monitoring and nurturing.

The most resilient buildings treat health not as a checkbox but as an ongoing practice.