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 and will run for 4 years. In one of the domains of PeBBu, the domain Indoor Environment, a state-of-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-of-the-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 point-of-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.