Performance based building for healthy Buildings

Performance Based Building (PBB) is an approach that advocates thinking in ends rather than means. Given its apparent potential PBB has not yet gained a lot of attention. The Thematic Network PeBBu has been established to show and disseminate the benefits of this approach. Within PeBBu, attention has been put on several topics of which one was related to the Indoor Environment, more specifically Healthy Buildings. A State-of-the-Art on PBB and its application with respect to healthy building was developed and served as the basis for a research agenda focusing at the further development and applicability of the PBB approach for constructing healthy buildings

Performance Based Building and its application to Healthy Buildings

The European funded Project PeBBu, Performance Based Building, is a Thematic network under the Competitive and Sustainable Growth program, which started September 1st, 2001 andwill run for 4 years. In one of the domains of PeBBu, the domain Indoor Environment, a stateof-the-art on the Performance Based Building (PBB) approach with respect to healthy buildings is prepared. The state-of-the-art on performance criteria for healthy buildings deals with current available methods, guidelines, protocols and tools to design, evaluate and measure the health status of buildings or designs for buildings. The health of buildings in this context relates to: air quality, ventilation, thermal comfort, noise and visual comfort. The work furthermore presents a framework in which the state-of-the-art and future research in this area can be positioned. After a short introduction into PBB and its definition, this paper will summarize the state-ofthe- art with respect to performance and healthy buildings, i.e. the results from the work of this domain within the PeBBu Network. With the developed framework as a base, different points of departure are chosen to indicate the status of performance based building: the building pointof- view and the environmental attributes point-of-view. The main conclusion is that the PBB-approach already has a basis in the building process, but that some specific topics are lacking that currently impede the further integration of PBB. Indoor environmental attributes appear specifically suited for the PBB-approach and some interesting initiatives of performance based approaches for healthy building are ongoing or have been developed in recent years. Nevertheless, a lot of work still is required before PBB can completely replace the current prescriptive building methods, if possible at all