Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

efficiency. Standards target the control of the relative humidity
and CO 2
-concentration to ensure acceptable indoor
air quality. Within the context of the ongoing pandemic, the
adequate ventilation of indoor spaces has become key to
minimising the virus’s community transmission. Designers
and planners must then integrate health-related aspects
in the development of ventilation concepts.
Auditive comfort is related to how well different
sound occurrences (speech, music) are perceived in a specific
indoor environment and how disturbing noise from outside
or within the same building can be prevented. Therefore,
the main indices describing auditive comfort are related to
room acoustics (e.g. reverberation time, speech transmission
index) and building acoustics (e.g. sound level, impact sound
pressure level), united by the domain of psychoacoustics, correlating
physical phenomena with human perception. There
is no integrating index for rating auditive comfort; single
indices assess each of the effects mentioned above. Regarding
health and wellbeing, the appropriate design of spaces for
their dedicated purposes is of utmost importance — this includes
the art of designing concert halls for musical events
and spaces for silence and relaxation, to name to most contrary
design objectives. Most hazardous to health is probably
continuing noise experience — either received from outside
(e.g. traffic) or directly from the indoor environment. Even
if not consciously perceived, it raises the stress level with unfavourable
human body reactions. This effect is particularly
true for young people permanently exposed to high noise
levels in poorly designed school buildings with negative impacts
not only for learning.
Until now, the effect on the health and wellbeing
of the main environmental stimulus have been addressed
separately. Although results from recent studies on the
multidomain effect are inconclusive and even contradictory,
it is clear that perception and behaviour in the indoor environment
result from the complex interaction of stimulus.
For instance, light colour has been proven to affect thermal
sensation, as well as the slight effect of acoustics in thermal
comfort. Environmental comfort is highly correlated to the
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