CHAPTER 5

BUILDING-IN-USE
ASSESSMENT OF
BUILDING SYSTEMS:
AIR QUALITY, THERMAL COMFORT,

AND BUILDING NOISE CONTROL

"In many ways, air quality testing is like using a vegetable

colander to trap a fruitfly that mayor may not be floating in a
bowl of milk."

Dr. Gemma Kerr

BUILDING SYSTEMS' DIMENSIONS

OF FUNCTIONAL COMFORT
Each of the seven Building-In-Use dimensions presents an inherent
challenge or paradox: none is what it seems once it is seen in the con-
text of the user-environment system. These challenges are not insur-
mountable problems, but they are also not obviously resolvable using
conventional analysis. Each requires what Handy calls "upside-down
thinking" to understand it and know what, if anything, to do about it.
In Handy's terms, upside-down thinking "has never been popular with
upholders of continuity and of the status quo, ... invites one to consider
the unlikely if not the absurd," considers seriously things at first sight
/I

91

J. C. Vischer, Workspace Strategies

© Chapman & Hall 1996
 92 Workspace Strategies

impossible, or ludicrous," and believes in change and in moving for-

ward into the unknown. 1 By understanding in a more practical context
how these dilemmas and apparent paradoxes affect the user-environ-
ment system, all players in the system-managers, facilities staff, build-
ing users, designers, and builders-can learn to direct a closer and more
informed eye at the environmental quality of different types of work-
space.
The BIU dimensions of air quality, thermal comfort and building noise
control are connected because they depend on the operation and func-
tioning of building systems, primarily mechanical and air handling
systems. Air quality presents a sort of generic mismatch-a credibility
dilemma-in which information gathered from occupants about the na-
ture of their air quality experiences in the workspace often fails to
match information about air quality conditions based on data collected
through conventional instrumentation. We call this the Air Quality
Dilemma. Another BIU dimension, thermal comfort, presents a quirky
paradox: BIU ratings of thermal comfort for a space, as derived from a
Building-In-Use Assessment of that space, have been found to bear no
obvious systematic relationship to the number and type of hotline com-
plaints building managers have received about temperature problems
for the same space. And building noise control poses a different sort of
problem: using instruments to measure noise levels may tell us if back-
ground noise levels are too loud, but will not give us equally important
information, namely that occupants are uncomfortable when the back-
ground noise levels are too soft.
Taken together, these three dilemmas provoke interesting and in-
formative questions about functional comfort as it relates to building
systems. Are surveys of users measuring inappropriately and should
they abandoned in favor of other more reliable indicators of the status
of these three dimensions in a building? Or do people simply not al-
ways tell the truth? Or perhaps different measurement techniques fail
to complement each other and have the effect of counteracting each
other's results? A deeper exploration of the Air Quality Dilemma may
assist us in answering these questions.

THE AIR QUALITY DILEMMA

On receiving indoor air quality complaints from building occupants,
managers typically opt to carry out instrument testing, either to have a
better definition of the problem, or to find a solution to it, or to find out
whether the complainers are imagining things. The results of such tests
often show that the air meets all existing health and comfort standards,