The building envelope protects us from the elements, enables comfort, and ultimately allows us to be at home in our houses, to be productive at the office, to learn in school, or to heal in the hospital.

A building envelope, also commonly called a “building enclosure,” should:

• support comfort
• manage moisture
• not poison us or the planet
• allow us to breathe clean air

When possible, it should do all this while using resources effectively—durably, energy-efficiently, and with low embodied impacts.

Daylight connects us with the outdoors, provides an essential nutrient, and makes our interior spaces glow with natural beauty. Exposure to bright daylight, even indoors, has been shown to relieve sleep disorders and may contribute to general health and well-being, decreasing absenteeism at both work and school.

Yet daylighting can go awry, resulting in glare, overheating, and loss of productivity. These resources shed light on the benefits of daylighting as well as strategies for doing it right.

Materials really do matter to the health of occupants and the environment, but finding out what is in a product—and why—is not easy.

Products also have to perform as intended, so there are often tradeoffs between performance and the most sustainable materials.

Here you will find articles on:

• the least hazardous, most environmentally sustainable materials used in products
• environmental product declarations that can reveal the life-cycle impacts of materials
• standards and third-party certifications that provide important VOC criteria and other health and performance metrics
• chemicals of concern in building materials

You’ll also learn how what makes a product green can differ from product category to product category, and why multi-attribute vetting is critical no matter what product or material you’re selecting or specifying.

Schools can be a great testing ground for pushing new boundaries.

Typically lacking in intensive energy loads, and operating on a short calendar, they are relatively approachable candidates for net-zero-energy goals.

School officials and parents alike may also be receptive to upgrades associated with less-toxic materials or better indoor air quality for the sake of the young minds that will spend so much time there. For these reasons and more, school projects sometimes provide the best case studies for what’s on the horizon for other building types.

The WELL Building Standard, from the International Well Buildings Institute (IWBI), is closely modeled on LEED but is focused exclusively on occupant health (which is just one of numerous factors in LEED).

As with LEED, each category includes prerequisites (or “preconditions”) and credits (“optimizations”). WELL buildings can be certified to three levels: Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

Fitwel is different. There are no prerequisites, only optional credits. To achieve the lowest level of certification (one star out of three), projects need to achieve 90 points out of 144 possible. Although no specific criteria are required for certification, the program is based on an elaborate weighting system that incentivizes the highest-impact criteria based on peer-reviewed science.