Global standards for indoor environmental monitoring under development

With new and untested indoor environmental monitoring sensors and sensor-based systems coming on the market, there is confusion and uncertainty in the marketplace, according to the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI).

In an effort to provide guidance to developers and owners, IWBI and other building standard and certification organizations RESET, the Building Research Establishment (BRE), and the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) are developing global standards and guidelines for indoor and outdoor environmental monitoring systems and sensors. These standards are meant to work seamlessly with WELL, LEED, BREEAM, RESET, and Green Star.

Data collected at the Well Living Lab will be used to develop the standards. The sensor-filled lab is a reconfigurable space where researchers monitor and test technologies and protocols with human subjects in simulated environments.

The effort is part of a movement among building certification bodies to coordinate their aspects of their standards to make it easier for facility owners to earn multiple certifications.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.