Naturally ventilated buildings are often preferred to air-conditioned ones
Naturally ventilated buildings are often preferred to air-conditioned ones even though asp they perform worse according to "scientific" measures of heat and humidity and air-cleanliness. The reason for this is that in most naturally ventilated buildings you book can open the windows - you have control over your surroundings. As next asp week's forum will hear, human psychology book - and, in particular, issues of book power and autonomy - is emerging as a chief clue to the "mystery" of sick buildings.The white-collar revolution of the past 15 years - the move to asp a service economy, the great book book human migration to an indoor office habitat, the new relationship between humans and computers - offers a sharp contrast with the past. For most of history, humans have been an outdoor species, in regular contact with nature. But, you do not need to book be a biophiliac book - one who believes book book human beings need contact with nature - to appreciate the enormity of the change. We asp spend more than 90 per cent of our lives indoors, a proportion that book is increasing as our hours of work increase Nature may be wet, cold and windy, but at least it asp is free.
Offices, by contrast, are controlled - often badly by someone else.Adrian Leaman, a speaker at the forum and co-author of a new research report from the BRE on comfort in offices, says research into sick building syndrome in the late Eighties constantly threw up "control" as a key variable, correlating closely with most measures of occupant satisfaction. At its simplest, many people are unhappy because they cannot switch on a light or turn off the heating.Most buildings do not give people this control. The BRE study was based on an analysis of 16 buildings by social scientists and building services engineers and identified "virtuous clusters" in some buildings, in which comfort, control, health, productivity and energy efficiency went together. But Mr Leaman says only 10 per cent of buildings fall into this category.
Most exhibit a "vicious circle" of staff dissatisfaction and low productivity, representing what the report calls a "substantial hidden cost to many organisations".Yet control is in part a metaphor for power and hierarchy Staff unhappiness is largely ignored, says Mr. Leaman, because "the people with the most power tend to have the most control. They sit next to windows, they have cellular offices and comfortable working conditions Control also goes with things like being male. Women tend to sit in the middle of buildings, away from the window seats. So they are more sensitive to poorer conditions."In some offices, skilled and committed building services managers can make up for the lack of personal control by responding quickly to complaints. That this is a rarity points to another feature which may be crucial to understanding what makes buildings sick.Next week, Mr Leaman will join with Bill Bordass, a leading consultant, in advancing the thesis that we are creating buildings that are too complex to manage. Faced with the task of herding ever larger numbers of people (and their computers and faxes), into ever bigger spaces, building designers have opted for central, automated control systems, aimed at removing control from occupants and keeping offices within broad bands of comfort in the 19-25C temperature and 25-60 per cent humidity range.