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New open-source building standard seeks pioneer sites

CIOB member Dr Darren Allen DBA FCIOB MRICS, development manager with Genesis Property, is looking for buildings to become the first to promote a new ground-breaking building standard.

With a strategy to engineer safer built environments for people and organisations returning to their offices, the Immune Building Standard has been developed as an open-source global standard for the built environment. 

The standard is a set of measures, technical solutions and facility management practices to certify how built environments can withstand present and future health challenges and minimise the impact of a pandemic such as covid-19, and other bacteriological or toxicological threats.

The standard is inspired by technologies and procedures successfully applied in hospitals and ‘clean rooms’ and adapted for use in commercial real estate development.

Immune can be used by any international building assessment and certification entity to certify buildings at any stage of their life cycle and type, such as new, in-use, or a regeneration project.

The current open-source document is dedicated to office buildings only and it can be adapted to certify other building types such as hospitality, retail, healthcare, education and residential. Buildings must meet set criteria and will be measured on a score index resulting in either a resilient, powerful or strong label.

As the standard is open source, more contributors are also being sought, to join the scientists, engineers and architects already on board. 

Allen says the standard is attracting wide-scale attention: “The Immune Building Standard is the first standard dedicated to health within the built environment. We have seen a large interest and engagement from leading tier 1 consultants, architects etc. and have been interviewed by media like FT, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Sky, to name a few.”

Contributors span the globe and include Mace in London. For full details see www.immune-building.com

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