CANADA AND
THE WELL
BUILDING
STANDARD As the average person now spends more than 90% of their time indoors, understanding how the built environment protects and supports human health is not only critical, but it presents a major opportunity. This is because healthy indoor environments can reduce toxic exposure, improve ventilation rates, support healthy eating and physical activity, enhance ergonomics, maximize daylighting and biophilic exposure, and allow for both focused group work and recovery time - to name just some of the benefits. Given this, the environments where we live, work, play and learn should enable us to more easily make these healthy choices.
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By Whitney Austin Gray, Renée Rietveld and Martha MacInnis
Over the past decade, the building industry has increasingly positioned itself
The WELL Building Standard can be applied across
within the health and wellness conversation, with LEED as the catalyst, along with
many real estate sectors, with WELL v1 optimized for
the Living Building Challenge, Active Design Guidelines and others. Yet, there was
commercial and institutional office buildings. WELL is
a need to move beyond indoor environmental quality issues to include whole-
further organized into Project Typologies of New and
person health such as physical fitness, nourishment, mental health and wellness,
Existing Buildings, New and Existing Interiors, and Core
and to support healthy behavior choices. If, after all, even with optimal air quality,
and Shell, which account for specific considerations
you are still battling constant interruptions, glare from sunlight and temperature
that are unique to a particular building type. Pilot
regulation issues, compounded by a lack of healthy food options and no opportu-
Programs are also available for market sectors includ-
nity for physical activity breaks – the human body will be affected in other ways.
ing retail, multi-family residential, education, restaurant, and commercial kitchen projects.
A Path Toward Health and Wellness In 2014, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) released the WELL
WELL + LEED
Building Standard® [WELL] to address this exact need through a holistic
WELL and LEED complement each other in the
approach. As the world’s first building standard to focus exclusively on enhancing
optimization of healthy and high performance environ-
people’s health and well-being through the built environment, WELL sets forth a
ments. IWBI welcomes projects to pursue LEED along-
path for designing buildings that support wellness while educating and engag-
side WELL in order to promote both environmental
ing the design and health industries about the importance of building design on
sustainability and human health. LEED certification is
health. The culmination of seven years of rigorous research and development
important for achieving the best possible outcomes for
working with leading physicians, scientists and industry professionals, WELL is a
environmental sustainability, and WELL maximizes the
performance-based certification system that marries best practices in design and
potential for supporting human health and wellness.
construction with evidence-based medical and scientific research. Projects earn WELL Certification by achieving features in seven categories of building performance – air, water, light, nourishment, fitness, comfort, and mind. Each WELL Feature is designed to address issues that impact the health, comfort or knowledge of occupants through design, operations and behavior.
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SPRING 2016 | BC FOCUS
WELL IS LIKE A NUTRITION LABEL FOR YOUR BUILDING. WELL SHOWS THE INGREDIENTS THAT GO INTO A HEALTHY BUILDING, HOME OR NEIGHBORHOOD. COPYRIGHT© 2015 BY DELOS LIVING LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED [1]. TOUCHDOWNS ALONG THE WINDOW PROVIDE VIEWS OF THE TD CENTRE GREEN ROOF BELOW AS WELL AS OTHER ACTIVE URBAN SPACES OUTSIDE OF THE TOWERS [2].