Description
Essential Building Science
A Case for Building Science
WHY DO WE NEED BUILDING SCIENCE? We’ve been building shelter just fine, all around the world and throughout time, without quantifying the physics of heat and moisture movement. Safe shelter is a birthright to all, and the potential to design, to build, to create, exists within each of us. Doesn’t all this complicated building science just get between us and the work, complicate things and distract us from our intuition?
Essential Building Science
So, why do we need building science? Because our buildings have grown increasingly complex, and we expect very high levels of comfort from them. Many of the biggest problems we have with our homes arise from problems with how our buildings manage heat and moisture. Much of the housing stock in North America is plagued by significant moisture problems (rot and mold), poor indoor air quality, and exorbitant energy loads, leading to great expense — for both the climate and for owners. We ask a lot of our buildings in terms of interior climate control, comfort, healthy space, and good durability, and in pursuit of these goals we burn a lot of carbon and use a lot of toxic materials. We need the tools and understanding afforded to us by the practice of applied building science to understand these problems better, so we can choose solutions that will create buildings that meet our needs without enacting such a heavy toll on the planet’s well-beingEssential Building Science
Some of these solutions are old. We have been building with low-impact materials such as wood, stone, earth, lime, and straw for thousands of years. After nearly a century of building with whatever (possibly toxic) materials manufacturers were offering, many people now demand healthy homes built with low-toxic materials that provide high levels of efficiency with low carbon footprints. Those time-tested natural materials we built with for all those pre-Industrial Revolution years are more relevant than ever. To adapt them into this new context, we need to apply building science principles to ensure we use these natural materials effectively to create durable, high-performance homes.
Some of these solutions are new. So, we need to be able to predict how a building might perform before taking risks and trying new things. We can never really know, of course, until a building has been up for a few decades — but we need to know enough to manage risk and innovate appropriately. We need to have some benchmarks and goals to know if the new things we try are indeed working.
Most of all, we need building science because we need to elevate the bar of quality for our built environment, not just incrementally, but significantly and quickly, to address the critical issues of climate destabilization, unsafe and insecure housing, “sick” buildings, and housing that costs too much to operate. We can use what we have learned through observation and experimentation with heat, moisture, and materials, and by referencing patterns that have surfaced in thousands of buildings over the last few hundred years to dramatically improve the durability, safety, comfort, cost, and impact of our buildings. While it is far from the only discipline involved in creating the built environment, building science has to play a critical role if we want to achieve the lofty goals we have set for ourselves.