Work

Healthy building design strategies: A cross-topic systematic review

Year: 2025

Type: review

Abstract: Buildings play a crucial role in human health. While past literature reviews have focused on specific aspects of building for health, like indoor environmental quality, a comprehensive understanding of healthy building strategies, especially those relevant to early-stage design, remains limited across domain areas. This study presents a systematic, cross-topic review of design strategies for healthy buildings and cities, analyzing over 100 papers across ten categories (over a decade) using a structured search. By focusing on earlier-stage solutions, the study highlights their pivotal role in shaping building performance. Our analysis reveals that research intensity varies significantly across categories, with ventilation, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality receiving the most attention. Meanwhile, while computational and simulation methods dominate research approaches, their practical implementation often falls short. Underlying data and codebases are often not made public. This review also identifies critical gaps, such as the dearth of validation of computational methods in real-world applications, the limited scalability and generalizability of many studies, a lag in the move toward open science, insufficient consideration of long-term impacts, and geographical concentration of research in developed regions.

Source: Journal of Building Engineering

DOI: 10.1016/j.jobe.2025.112421

Authors: Yu Qian Ang, Lup Wai Chew, Holly Samuelson

Institutions: Harvard University, National University of Singapore

Language: English

Topic: Building Energy and Comfort Optimization

Subfield: Building and Construction

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Good health and well-being

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,940