Material health is important for every designer, no matter if we specify construction and building materials, finishes for interiors, or ancillary items like furniture and equipment. Information about products and various types of material properties, including their impacts on health, is becoming more prominent. However, lack of guidelines and potential tools that could help us access this... Read more »
Today’s workforce understands that sitting all day is not healthy. As a result, employees are increasingly requesting more opportunities for movement throughout the workday. Workplace design has evolved to address sedentary behavior through active workstations, which allow individuals to experience the benefits of movement and posture change while engaging in productive work. Research on the health impacts of... Read more »
From Curbed’s article, “Proposed 80-story wooden skyscraper may be a preview of tall timber future”: “In a city lined with pathbreaking towers and skyscrapers, the River Beech project, if it comes to fruition, may earn its own chapter in the history of Chicago architectural marvels. That’s because this proposed 80-story tower, a joint research project between Cambridge... Read more »
To learn more about how mass-timber construction will scale up, as well as to define what’s currently included in the purview of mass-timber construction for low-, mid- and high-rise projects, Construction Dive spoke with Andrew Tsay Jacobs, director of the Building Technology Lab at Perkins+Will and a member of the International Code Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Tall... Read more »
Most skyscrapers are behemoths of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. As part of an ongoing project, researchers at Cambridge University, architects at Perkins+Will, and engineers at Thornton Tomasetti are proposing a timber skyscraper, called the River Beech Tower, in Chicago, Illinois. The team sees the wooden tower concept as an especially sustainable type of architecture since... Read more »
Flame retardants (FRs) are a group of additives that include toxic chemicals shown to be harmful to human and environmental health in many ways. With the enactment of California’s TB117-2013 for furniture fire safety and The Chicago Tribune’s scathing investigative report about FR manufacturers’ misleading marketing efforts, we learned that toxic chemicals are not the... Read more »
This article presents a study of a Pitt River Middle School (built in 2013) and, analyzes how close the project comes to achieving the International Passive House standard and what changes would need to be made to achieve the standard. The article reviews the target metrics associated with the Passive House Standard and processes involved... Read more »
This article explores how a responsive, acuity adaptable emergency room design can actively contribute to patient well-being along the continuum of care without sacrificing operational efficiencies. Increasing medical knowledge, prevalence, and social awareness of behavioral health issues have made it imperative to design therapeutic spaces that respond to the whole person, in addition to medical... Read more »
Building in harmony with nature allows for the comfort and well-being of inhabitants of a home, building, neighborhood, or even a district. In this research, we studied the ways in which harmony is achieved in nature, and the ways in which it is achieved in existing building science. We propose a novel bridge between active and passive mechanical... Read more »
The demand for non-toxic building products is encouraging manufacturers to replace “worst offender” chemicals with safer alternatives. This presents an opportunity for manufacturers to innovate with greener chemistry. Transparency (ingredient disclosure) in the building industry has been growing, pressuring manufacturers to disclose more about the composition of products than ever before. The public’s alarm about... Read more »
Transit administrators, engineers, and researchers often face problems for which information already exists, either in documented form or as undocumented experience and practice. This information may be fragmented, scattered, and unevaluated. As a consequence, full knowledge of what has been learned about a problem may not be brought to bear on its solution. Costly research findings may go unused,... Read more »
