WELL MOVEMENT V04 Facilities for Active Occupants
a consultant’s response to WELL Building Certification Feature ‘Movement V04 / Facilities for Active Occupants’
What is the WELL Building Standard?
The WELL Certification process for WELL V2 is now widely established as the leading healthy building and wellness real estate standard in the world today. It is essentially a series of guidelines backed by rigorous scientific research, that when taken together, will guide a real estate project, whether new build construction or refurbishment and fit-out, towards a final product that is aligned with human health and wellness.
Sections of the V2 standard are dedicated to Air, Water, Nourishment, Light, Movement, Thermal Comfort, Sound, Materials, Mind, Community & Innovation.
What is WELL consulting?
A WELL AP or WELL consultant is there to assist a project team through the certification process, ensuring maximum points are scored along the way by offering expert advice not just on how to lock-in points but also the principles that lie behind them. As a result, the project has every chance of becoming a model of health and wellness in the built environment.
Additionally, a WELL consultant’s skill set might include wellness interior design, biophilic design, knowledge in healthy buildings and consideration for sustainability / green buildings, a WELL building’s close cousin, as well as expertise in health and fitness, or as WELL like to call it ‘Physical Activity’, ‘Movement’ and ‘Nourishment’.
What is main focus of WELL Movement V04 Facilities for Active Occupants?
Essentially we are looking at bike storage facilities for those wishing to travel to their workplace by bike, as well as changing facilities and lockers for all those arriving by other forms of active transport, whether it be jogging or simply in need of a shower after a long, hot commute into the office in summer!
Nowadays these are essential components in a healthy building, either with or without a WELL certification.
The target audience here is active commuters but also active occupants - those showers can also encourage employees to go for a run after work, take a shower and then head out for a social appointment with friends, for example.
What issue is WELL Movement V04 Facilities for Active Occupants addressing?
On one level, it is about facilitating the lives of those who wish to travel under their own steam, by jogging or cycling into work, an active commuter in other words. These employees will be generally fitter, healthier and more productive in the workplace, with less days off (unless they end up hitting the IronMan circuit of course!) and less sick days. We can imagine this being especially important in the US where car culture and the lateral spread of cities makes a cycle commute more of a challenge.
In another sense, these active commuters are also placing less pressure on the road networks, they are not polluting, nor are they using public transport, so it is a win-win for both sides.
WELL Movement V04 Cycling Network & Bike Parking
Cycling infrastructure for a healthy building going for WELL Certification can be linked to location, tapping into the cycling network such as cycle lanes and bike sharing schemes.
Additionally, bike parking can be split into short-term (i.e. a public bike rack) for 2.5% of peak visitors, with a minimum of four spaces per building.
Long-term parking would be something like a dedicated bike room or bike wall with space for 5% of regular building occupants and a minimum of four per building. Finally, this same bike room, should provide a basic set of tools for cyclists to fix a tyre. Basic stuff but any cyclist will be glad to find a repair kit one day!
An extension of this we have seen in some healthy building case studies is to bring in a local bike mechanic every three months or so to give the regular cyclists a free bike tuning to ensure they are riding on safe tyres, brakes and so on.
All of the above simply needs to be verified by on-site photographs and a Letter of Assurance – by an architect or designer.
WELL Movement V04 On-site Shower Facilities
Showers, lockers and changing facilities come as a cluster for obvious reasons, and these elements need to be co-located next to each other, with five lockers per shower and the only other variable being the total requisite number of showers on offer within the healthy building to secure another point within WELL V04.
Essentially the calculation is 1 + 1 extra shower for 150 occupants above 100 for any WELL project below 1000 regular occupants.
If you are interested in our services helping you create a physical activity space / equipped gym for WELL Movement V08, contact us here.
