Flooring in commercial and residential buildings can have a variety of problems, from moldy carpets to debonded vinyl tiles to movement in wood flooring. Understanding the causes and solutions of these problems involves understanding the building as a system. What happens beneath and above a floor matters, in ways that aren’t always anticipated or well understood.
The articles in this section examine a range of building practices and materials – and the interactions between them – that can lead to flooring problems and solutions.
The construction and operation of buildings consumes over a third of the world’s energy consumption, and 40% of all the mined resources. Striving to make buildings more sustainable, while saving construction and operating costs and improving health and occupant well being is not only possible and practical, it should be the goal of the building industry. Achieving this goal requires an awareness of the problem and the skills to design, specify, construct, and operate buildings in a manner that is often quite different from current standard approaches. This digest will review the challenge of sustainability, discuss methods of assessing green buildings, and recommend a process by which more sustainable buildings can be delivered.
Water comes in four forms: solid, liquid, vapor and adsorbed. All four forms can cause grief to building owners, designers and contractors. When water causes building problems investigating and diagnosing the problem can be challenging because water constantly changes its form inside a building and within its materials. The investigator must hunt down the water thinking like water.
The current building industry focus on durability is in part a reaction to the current perceived lack of it. Warranty claims and callbacks are viewed as increasing. Litigation and insurance costs are felt to be rising as a result. Another reason for the current focus on durability is the recognition that sustainability is not possible without durability. If you double the life of a building and you use the same amount of resources to construct it, the building is twice as resource efficient. Therefore durability is a key component of sustainability.
It seems that one thing that both the development community and the environmental community can agree on is that durability is a good thing.
What do we know about durability and how do we know it? The lessons of durability have come principally out of failure. Engineering is an iterative process of design by failure. Buildings are constructed. Problems are experienced. Designs and processes are changed. Better buildings are constructed.
The building industry is in essence a reactive industry, not a proactive industry. It can be argued that the industry continues to do things until they become intolerably bad and then the industry changes. Examining failures gives us guidance on increasing the durability of building constructions.
An edited version of this Insight first appeared in the ASHRAE Journal.
Think of the good old days—the Civil War, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII—crawlspaces were uninsulated. They were ventilated and they didn’t have ground covers—and they didn’t have problems. Why?
This pamphlet is designed for members of the residential construction and remodeling industries, as well as owners and managers who work in affordable housing. It presents building guidance for both new construction and rehabilitation, as well as practices that can be used by property maintenance personnel.
