week 11- indoor environmental quality

The indoor environmental quality PowerPoint covers two things that are easy to overlook. Acoustics and indoor air both affect the health, safety, and welfare of the people inside a building. The scripture for the week, Leviticus 14:33-48, describes a house with a harmful condition that is inspected, has affected materials removed, and is then re-evaluated.

Indoor air quality was the part that connected most to our job as designers. It is affected by many factors, including the HVAC system, interior materials, furniture, fixtures, and equipment, moisture in the building, volatile organic compounds, and pollutants like mold, radon, and cigarette smoke. That makes our material choices part of the air people breathe. Poor air quality can cause symptoms ranging from irritated eyes to dizziness, fatigue, and asthma. Sick Building Syndrome, Building Related Illness, and Legionnaire’s disease showed that these problems can be serious and not just uncomfortable. Specifying materials that support good air quality is one of the most direct ways a designer can protect occupants.


Sound travels between spaces through openings, materials, windows, and structure-borne sound, and noise is simply unwanted sound. I also learned that the limit of human comfort is about 110-120 decibels. Controlling it comes down to how a room is designed. Sound waves travel directly through wall studs from one room to another, so staggered studs can disrupt them. Room volume matters too. Designers keep it low when they want a short reverberation time, and larger volumes are better for spaces like performance halls.

For offices, I took away that placement is a big part of speech privacy. The sound transmission diagrams showed poor, better, and best placement. Sound masking and varying partition heights can help meet a client’s privacy needs. On the sustainability side, acoustical clouds and canopies can address noise and privacy issues without building extra walls.


For the different design responses, the acoustical cloud was my favorite. It handles noise and privacy in one piece without changing the walls, and it brings attention to the ceiling plane. For a commercial example, I liked the staggered stud partition. It solves a technical problem inside the wall, where no one sees it, and it keeps adjoining rooms from hearing each other. The last example was choosing low-emitting materials. It is a quiet decision, but it affects the health of everyone who uses the space for years, and LEED rewards it for both acoustics and indoor air quality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 2 blog- Building, Design and Construction.

Image
When we talk about designing a building today, it's not enough to just make it look good. There's a whole web of ethical, moral, and legal responsibility that comes along with the job. Interior designers are part of a much bigger conversation about how buildings interact with the planet and the people who actually use them. That means understanding where our role fits in alongside architects, engineers, contractors, and specialists, and realizing that sustainable design isn't really you can accom plish yourself,   it's a coordinated, integrated process from day one. W hat does sustainability actually mean? There isn't just one theory, there's a whole landscape of them. The Natural Step challenges us to stop increasing concentrations of harmful substances and stop degrading nature's capacity to meet people's basic needs. Ecological Design, championed through Christopher Alexander's pattern language and William McDonough's Hannover Princ...
Read more

Site considerations and Building Enclosure- week 3- INT322

Image
     During the reading I noticed how much detail actually went into the site and enclosure decisions, way more than I expected from just seeing and walking around  the building. It gave me a much better understanding of how the concepts from the presentation actually play out in a real project instead of just being listed as bullet points.      Something I found interesting was how much the site itself shaped the design of the enclosure. The architects moved a 70 stall parking lot out of the middle of campus so the building could sit within a shared quad along with the chapel and library, which lines up directly with what the PowerPoint talked about regarding site placement and its impact on the building. The south of the building  was specifically oriented to take advantage of solar gain for both daylighting and the photovoltaic system, so the site consideration wasn't just about where the building sits, it directly influenced how the enclo...
Read more

Week 5- Walls

Image
          What stood out first was how differently a wall can be framed depending on what it needs to do structurally . Stud walls, built from wood or light-gauge steel studs spaced 12", 16", or 24" on center, are the system I was already familiar with. Concrete and masonry bearing walls are a different story entirely, since they carry structural load, which makes something as simple as running electrical wiring or plumbing through the wall a real design problem instead of an afterthought. Structural frame walls solve this a third way, using a column-and-beam skeleton that gets infilled with stud walls or structural insulated panels. It made me realize that how a wall is framed isn't just a construction detail, it changes what a designer is even allowed to do with that wall later. The vapor barrier diagram from the slides was the piece that finally made the moisture side of things click for me. Warm, moist air from inside a building moves toward the col...
Read more