The Future of Residential Design by James K. Lin, PE, LEED AP, Certified Passive House Designer, Associate Partner, JB&B
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically re-schematized the private residence as the nexus of work, schooling and entertainment as well as of family life, and brought home, quite literally, the same environmental safety concerns that had already presented themselves in medical and commercial scenarios. Now, even as the pandemic has evolved, the same strategies that have been developed, applied, and proven successful in other sectors are showing themselves to be equally viable for residential environments with little or no qualitative adjustment.
This paper will look at how a three-pronged approach—indoor air quality, flexible design, and people counting—can inform residential design in a way that addresses abiding—and evolving—concerns with state-of-art technological responses and regards an uncertain future with a steady eye on where the technology is pointing.
- Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) : The Future of Residential Design
Indoor air quality maintains pride of place at the forefront of these successful strategies, and the creative reconfiguration of filtration, disinfection and monitoring technologies inspired by work with healthcare facilities early on in the pandemic has become industry standard for application to other sectors.
The recommendations by the CDC and ASHRAE to increase ventilation air may not always be feasible due to outdoor environmental conditions, the capacity and/or the condition of the equipment. So, the next best thing is to increase the level of filtration for the various spaces within a residential building. One of the developers our firm is currently working with on a multi-family, market-rate rental project asked, “How can we get to hospital-grade filtration EVERYWHERE?” This wasn’t an entirely unexpected—or unwarranted—question. However, upon further discussion it turned out that “everywhere” didn’t really mean everywhere. With this particular client, as with many other residential sector owners and developers, it’s the common spaces such as lobbies, amenity spaces and elevator areas—that is, the places where one is most likely to encounter other people’s “particles”—that constitute the “everywhere” where they want to have higher levels of filtration.
The dwelling units themselves are generally considered to be acceptable with lower levels of filtration—an acceptance determined largely by the practical limitations of the equipment involved. At the central ventilation units, achieving a minimum of MERV 13 is the bare minimum to meet CDC guidelines, but many units can accommodate MERV 14 or 15 filters. At terminal units (fan coil units, evaporators and heat pumps) within dwelling units, it may be difficult to achieve the MERV 13 rating. But one way to do so is with the use of electrostatically charged filters: filters that, while inherently below a MERV 13 rating, have an electrostatic charge added to their filter media that allows them to perform like a
MERV 13 filter or better. Electrostatically charged filters also have a lower pressure drop than MERV 13 filters, which makes them more appropriate for terminal units. The electrostatic charge is not permanent, however, so the filter will need to be replaced more often, perhaps as frequently as once a month, or when they get wet and/or damaged.
In some applications, upgrading the filter is simply not feasible. When that’s the case, portable filtration units (often offering close to HEPA filtration levels) can be deployed in common spaces as well as in individual residences. These portable units simply provide additional opportunities for potentially contaminated air to pass through an air filter to allow the filter to remove contaminants from the air.
Once the baseline air filtration upgrade is in place, a layered approach can be utilized with other technologies that enhance indoor air quality. Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI), when properly sized and located, can be utilized to inactivate viruses and other pathogens in the air. There are also some emerging technologies, such as bipolar ionization, dry hydrogen peroxide, atmospheric disinfectant, electrostatic air cleaners, microbial suppression systems, oxidizing agents, etc., that show promising results in laboratory environments but lack the rigorous scientific test data to show that they would be effective in real-life applications today. This is not to say that these technologies are or are not effective. It is simply to say that there isn’t enough evidence at the moment to make a definitive call either way. So, what does a developer who is designing a residential building right now do? Should anything be done at all? What technology should be selected?
- Flexible Design : The Future of Residential Design
Flexible design, a design process that heightens the creative and analytic dynamics of the design phase of a project both to meet the present demands of a space while anticipating future safety-, environmental-, and technology-driven needs, has become an intrinsic element of engineering’s New Normal. Among its other disruptions, COVID has supercharged the news cycle with new information and new data coming in at an often overwhelming rate. As technology races to collate, process and apply this information, residential design, in order to be maximally adaptive and cost-effective, will become increasingly modular, with systems orchestrated for easy installation and deployment of new technologies.
With so much uncertainty surrounding the efficacy of the emerging technologies, however, it’s much akin to looking into a crystal ball when trying to pick THE best emerging technology. Since more and more scientific data is emerging at an increasingly rapid rate, the “best” keeps on changing. This leads some developers to ask, “Do we have to decide now?”, to which the answer is a resounding “NO!” The future of multi-family residential design is a future whose hallmark is flexibility. Design the HVAC systems to be able to readily accept the best available technology when the decision absolutely needs to be made instead of a year before the drop-dead date. Similar to the strategy of installing a deeper filter rack, one that could accommodate a 4 inch filter, but installing a 1 inch filter initially, we lean toward an “IAQ chassis” approach, whereby the space, access and power to accommodate future technologies is designed into the system initially, taking its cue off of existing and emerging technologies that are currently leading the pack. Whether the ultimate champion of the IAQ technology battle is filtration, bipolar ionization, UV-C lights, a “fog-based” virucide such as Grignard PureTM, or another product that hasn’t yet been dreamed of, the space within the system and power requirements are ready and waiting to be utilized with little to no modifications of the existing system. The chassis approach also allows for a solution that has been implemented to be swapped out for a newer and better technology in the future.
There will be different approaches based on the spaces served, system types and the overall IAQ goals for the building. Ultimately, the basic idea driving this approach is something that has been utilized in all sectors of our practice for a very long time: in hospitals, wanting to build in additional space in the air handling units for future UV systems to prevent mold growth on cooling coils and their associated drain pans; in commercial office buildings, setting aside space and valved outlets for additional chillers to hedge against future tenants that have much higher cooling needs; and in data centers, leaving space and connection points for a future emergency generator in anticipation of growth over time. In this application, it’s simply a big-picture approach scaled down to the parameters of a family residence.
- People Counting
An existing, relatively simple technology is presenting exciting possibilities as social distancing establishes itself as a cultural norm and kinesthetic fact of life: people counting. Electronic sensors that measure the number of people entering a facility or zone of a facility can, via a simple app, provide the resident of a building with an accurate count of how many people are, for example, in the laundry room, the lobby, the gym, or waiting for an elevator. Social distancing has become a major source of anxiety in the Age of COVID. A technology as simple as people counting could significantly adjust a person’s anxiety level in the place where it counts the most: the building they live in.
The level of comfort with being indoors around other people varies drastically from one person to another. Polls have shown, for example, that there are wide discrepancies among age groups, economic levels and political affiliations regarding the perception of safe distancing—and even wider when it comes to hugging and handshaking. This variability makes it extremely difficult for building managers and owners to decide to spend precious capital to deploy an IAQ measure to enhance occupant experience when in fact the upgrade may not represent meaningful change for all residents in the building. One way to help address this is to couple IAQ upgrades with people-counting technology that is readily available in the marketplace today.
Originally used primarily in retail and sports/entertainment venues to gauge customer traffic patterns, people-counting technologies have seen a dramatic market increase over the past few years—and certainly a noticeable bump in the past year and a half. The technologies range from infrared beam counters to video-, thermal-, and WiFi-based sensors, each with their own pros and cons but generally easy to afford and deploy. As privacy issues have also emerged as a sociopolitical sidebar to the pandemic, it should be noted that none of these technologies gather any information beyond where a body or group of bodies is situated in a particular space. And there are other less health-related perks as well that draw the technology into the realm of pure amenity: With the people-counting app on their cell phone, a resident could check out the count in the laundry room before heading down with a basketful of laundry; or see how many people are in the Fitness Room—and even if someone’s using the elliptical machine! Equipment could even be reserved in advance. Now, that’s an amenity to help differentiate a building from the others! It’s also a providential way of integrating health concerns into the nuts and bolts of normal life—which may ultimately be the pandemic’s biggest takeaway.
Choosing Effective Change
We’ve probably all heard the saying “The only constant is change.” Our experience of the past year and a half might allow us to update that to “The only certainty is uncertainty.” We’ve learned to live with rapidly shifting information, rapidly shifting perspectives, rapidly shifting emotions. Even just during the course of writing this paper, the verbs concerning the virus shifted from the present tense to the past—and back to the present. But the constant here is the growing knowledge that we need to take more concerted regard of the spaces in which we work and especially, as this paper has focused on, in which we live. That focus has taken in three primary strategies, IAQ chief among them as the most developed and effective through widespread deployment and development in healthcare and commercial space applications. But improving IAQ—or, for that matter, implementing flexible design or people counting—will take ongoing commitment from developers as well as coordination between the engineer and the architect. While we all look forward to the time when COVID is relegated to a more flu-like status with similar prophylaxis, that day may still be far off, but these technologies are here right now. We have only to continue our creative exploration of their possibilities to make the safety of our private spaces a reassuring constant in a time of bewildering change.
The Future of Residential Design by James K. Lin, PE, LEED AP, Certified Passive House Designer, Associate Partner, JB&B
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