Sustainability, Health and Productivity to Accelerate a Quality Built Environment

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This course explores the relationship of quality buildings, building systems, infrastructures and land-use to productivity, health, well-being, and a sustainable and resilient environment. The course begins with a series of lectures on high performance enclosure, mechanical, lighting, interior and networked building design decisions and extends to sustainable communities and infrastructures. The course engages students in the research literature that relates these building design decisions to multiple cost/performance impacts, including: energy, carbon, facilities management, organizational change, technological change, attraction/retention (quality of life) of employees, individual productivity, organizational productivity, salvage and waste (the circular economy), tax/ insurance/ litigation, and human health. Understanding environmental design principles and advances in building systems and systems integration for performance is critical to our professional commitment to improving quality of life through the built environment, with the addition of life-cycle decisionmaking to catalyze client and national commitments to designing and upgrading buildings and communities to ensure a shared quality of life.