Indoor environment quality in buildings and its impact on the outdoor environment.

The main purpose of buildings is to provide a comfortable living environment for their occupants. This includes, among others, thermal, visual and acoustic comfort as well as indoor air quality. Except during the fifties and sixties, it has always been considered important that an excess use of energy should be avoided in the construction and the management of a building, sometimes even at the cost of user comfort. Energy saving is however not the main purpose of the building. Indeed, if it were really so, the largest energy savings would be obtained by not erecting the building in the first place. Since the Rio conference, there have been more and more incentives to save energy and lower the impact of buildings on the environment. Therefore there is no excuse for the building sector not to adopt a sustainable development policy. Some energy is required to control the indoor climate and indoor air quality. Therefore, it is often suspected that energy savings result in poorer indoor environment quality, or, on the contrary, that a high comfort level is the result of high technology and high energy consumption. This is not true. It is now generally admitted among building scientists that high quality energy services do not necessarily incur a high energy use, and that good environment quality can be obtained with a reasonable amount of energy and power, and with a low environmental impact. The presentation brings some evidence from past and current research to support this assertion.