Healthy Buildings: cambiare il concetto di salute per un ambiente costruito sano - Healthy Buildings: changing the concept of health for a healthy built environment

The purpose of a dwelling is to meet the needs of its users; therefore, the functional properties of the building should meet all the needs arising from the biological, psychological, and social structure of the same. We will see how over the years the abstraction of “bad air quality” has evolved and how it has affected the health of individuals; talking about the concept of sick buildings and how it has come today to certify and give scores to the building to define it as “healthy”. The Sick Building Syndrome shows a well-defined symptomatic picture, which manifests itself in many building occupants, equipped with mechanical ventilation and global air conditioning systems, without the introduction of fresh air from the outside, used for civil homes, offices, schools, hospitals, gyms, homes for the elderly and others. Although the symptoms that occur in work environments are modest, they can have more harmful effects than some serious diseases and with a worse prognosis in domestic environments, due to their significant and perpetual living. For this reason, the topic analysed will focus on unprotected public housing buildings, for which no one now has ever posed the problem of verifying their environmental quality. The etiology is still in continuous development today, since it varies from case to case, also due to the disease due to SARS-CoV-2 currently in progress; factors related to ventilation systems, air quality, thermo-hygrometric quality, humidity, dust and parasites, safety and protection, water quality, acoustic quality and lighting and visual quality, play an important role, in order to define a “Healthy Building” and above all certified built environment, through the attribution of certain scores to the fundamentals analysed to define the quality, healthiness and safety of the same.