Architecturally safe and healthy classrooms: eco-medical concept to achieve sustainability in light of COVID-19 global pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic. With this announcement, the world is facing a major challenge. This research commenced as an initiative to conceptualize internal architectural space design to cope with epidemics, to ensure an architectural anti-virus environment. In fact, architectural spaces with high occupancy loads are considered a fertile environment for the spread of this virus. This study discusses classrooms as one of those patterns with high densities for a significant reason; previous studies have revealed that pupils between the ages of 5 to 18 years may be carriers of the infection, but without symptoms; therefore, this category is considered a major source of transmitting the infection to their families and society. Accordingly, this research will address the most important standards, and design norms for these spaces using an electronic questionnaire and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, to achieve two objectives: first, a healthy classroom to reduce the COVID-19 infection among pupils to promote both wellbeing and performance of users, and second, a sustainable classroom from architecture, HVAC, and a medical point of view. In addition, four alternative classroom designs were proposed based on the interpretive results from the questionnaire and simulation.