Buro Happold on getting back to work

Buro Happold has a deep bench of expert advisors who can assist facilities teams in developing a return to work strategy and provide guidance on optimization of indoor air quality.


Our services and capabilities to assist facilities teams in developing a return to work strategy, and guidance on optimization of indoor air quality is below. Our menu of services is as follows:

Our Services


Energy and IAQ Audits

Buro Happold has extensive experience conducting ASHRAE audits through campus portfolio reviews and portfolio energy efficiency reviews. Combined with a deep understanding of indoor air quality issues, simple maintenance opportunities are easily identified, along with an understanding of defects to rectify. By overlaying energy and IAQ considerations, and informed choice can be made about improvements or modifications to HVAC systems.

Enhancing Indoor Air Quality

As part of the net zero energy strategy, the work we did on Santa Monica City Hall East utilizes natural ventilation for passive cooling, combined with radiant slabs and a VAV system for morning warm up and peak summer cooling. The project incor- porates progressive demand control ventilation technologies to provide an optimal internal environment in both mechanical and natural ventilation mode balanced against energy consumption.

Continuous Air Quality Monitoring

Buro Happold’s Los Angeles office is a highly sustainable workspace and works as a living laboratory for its employees. Automatic shades and daylighting controls allow occupant control over light levels, with a solar film installed to reduce energy consumption. Underfloor displacement ventilation and the use of AWAIR continuous environmental monitoring sensors to monitor air quality and thermal comfort, both provide enhanced indoor air quality.

Upgrading Assets: Getting the Data

Continuous air quality and environmental monitoring is essential for existing buildings looking to achieve health and wellness performance rating systems, such as WELL. WELL Certification mandates strict adherence to air, water, light, acoustics and other measurable performance benchmarks. Continuous air quality testing and data collection is essential to understanding a building’s baseline performance. Once improvement strategies are chosen, performance is monitored in real time, helping to secure WELL performance verification success. At Buro Happold, changes were made to cleaning products and outside air rates were optimized to balance both energy consumption and air quality.

Supporting Third Party Certifications: Ongoing Optimization

LEED, Living Building Challenge, Reset, and WELL are all popular third party certifications for new construction, revolving around science- based, performance-driven certification metrics. Just as source EUI has become the standard metric for energy performance, health and wellness metrics are now required in all sustainability frameworks. All

standards also require the measurement of multiple air quality attributes, including thermal comfort and biophilic concerns such as acoustics and circadian light. Deployment of permanent monitoring systems means ongoing tracking of data over time, and the ability to respond to defects as soon as they arise to better balance IAQ and energy consumption.

People Flow Modeling

Buro Happold’s Analytics team provides an innovative service that optimizes design and the operational planning of buildings. We understand how people behave and interact with spaces, using this understanding to optimize layouts, circulation capacities, wayfinding, logistics and operational strategies. By assessing, modeling and predicting the way in which people interact with buildings and spaces, we know how to get the most from diverse environments. At the core of our expertise is the ‘science of moving dots’, backed by decades of research, vast amounts of behavior data, and in-house development of sophisticated BIM-integrated modeling tools.

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