Designing after COVID-19: Strategies for the evaluation, monitoring and control of indoor air quality

The speech presents urban and domestic living and how these have been modified by the new needs, concerns and fears connected to the most recent global pandemic. The contribution highlights how urban and domestic dimensions are key elements of our existence and resistance. The present contribution aim to explore the assessment of "Indoor Environmental Quality" in the living space. The issue of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is highly underestimated in relation to the magnitude of the potential consequences on the healthiness of inhabited spaces. Today, the health effects associated with poor air quality in buildings are well known and classified, such as the Sick Building Syndrome, a symptomatic picture that occurs in many occupants of homes, offices, schools, hospitals, etc. equipped with mechanical ventilation systems and global air conditioning. A condition of adequate IAQ is absolutely achievable in new buildings, given the possibility of selecting appropriate materials, furnishings and technical systems, as well as design according to criteria of ventilation, hygrometric control and air quality of passive type. Greater difficulties are found on the built, where the options for intervention are complex and often related to significant economic burden. In these cases, a careful evaluation of the boundary conditions is necessary, in order to understand which problems can be solved with simple technical-design measures and which ones instead require substantial interventions, but which cannot be ignored if the polluting factor is particularly dangerous. The speach - also thanks to a wide comparative examination of studies, technical norms and international projects - provides an adequate knowledge of the problem as well as the tools for the evaluation of the different options and technical solutions able to guarantee the control through design choices in order to the specific material-constitutive characteristics and physical structure of the confined environment.