Building for Health and the Future
Georgetown University’s Global Cities program hosted the International WELL Building Institute’s Healthy Building Policy Summit 2025. Leaders from government, academia, design, and the private sector came together to address one central question:
What does it mean to create buildings that truly advance human health?
For decades, conversations about buildings have focused on efficiency, costs, or aesthetics. But as the summit made clear, healthy buildings are no longer optional luxuries. They are essential infrastructure for human flourishing and economic resilience. The speakers, from former Surgeon Generals to policy leaders and design practitioners, drove home the same point: when we design and operate healthier spaces, we shape healthier futures.
Health as a Moral and Economic Imperative
Richard Carmona, the 17th U.S. Surgeon General, framed the built environment as both shield and shaper. Our buildings protect us from the elements, but they also shape our physical, emotional, and even financial well-being. Investing in healthier buildings, Carmona emphasized, is not just morally good but it is also economically smart.Optimal buildings allow people to work optimally. Choices about design, ventilation, materials, and lighting influence comfort and affect productivity, absenteeism, long-term healthcare costs, and ultimately, competitiveness. “A decision about how to shape the built environment,” Carmona said, “is a decision about how to shape the future.”
Policy vs. Technology: What’s Really Holding Us Back?
Georgia Lagoudas sharpened the conversation by challenging a common assumption: healthy buildings are not primarily a technology problem. The knowledge and tools to design healthier spaces largely already exist. What’s missing is a policy framework that guarantees access.We know how to improve indoor environmental quality. We know how to monitor air quality, optimize ventilation, and reduce toxic exposures. But without policy commitments, access to healthier spaces remains a privilege, not a right. Lagoudas’s point reframed the issue: the gap between possibility and reality is political, not technological.
Demand, Market Forces, and Occupant Power
The market is responding but only because people are demanding healthier spaces. As Jonathan Gritz observed, adoption of WELL standards and similar frameworks has accelerated because tenants and building occupants are insisting on it. Without that bottom-up demand, many developers and landlords might not see the business case.This bottom-up push suggests an encouraging truth: occupants hold power. Every time employees ask about workplace wellness, every time students demand better campus living environments, every time families choose healthier housing, they shift market dynamics.
From “Below Average” to “Pretty Good”
Sean McGrady with UL provided a sobering reality check. If a global pandemic wasn’t enough to permanently shift how owners and developers think about healthy buildings, policy intervention may be the only lever left. Yet, McGrady also noted, moving from “below average” to “pretty good” doesn’t always require massive investment. Sometimes it’s just a matter of low-hanging fruit and elbow grease. Simple upgrades like improved filtration, maintenance practices, or daylighting strategies that deliver disproportionate benefits.
Health Beyond Lifespan: Thinking About Brainspan
Whitney Austin Gray reframed the meaning of health itself. “Your lifespan is longer than your brainspan,” she noted, highlighting the challenge of maintaining not just years of life, but quality years of cognitive vitality.For her, health is personal and practical: Do you have energy left at the end of the day after doing what you have to do? Health, she argued, must be seen as an investment, not an expense. Her insights echo findings in the IWBI’s “Health Pays Back” report, which quantifies the return on investment of healthier workplaces.
Values in Action: Georgetown’s Perspective
Representing the campus planning efforts at Georgetown University, Rachel Gilbert Kohli reminded us that the built environment can and should embody institutional values. Georgetown’s ethos of cura personalis, care for the whole person, is reflected in campus design decisions: from spaces for contemplation and social interaction to academic environments that foster excellence.Her remarks underscored that healthy buildings are not just technical artifacts, but they are cultural expressions. How we shape space reflects who we aspire to be as institutions and communities.
Challenging the Status Quo
For Rachel Hodgdon, CEO and President of IWBI, the biggest competitor to WELL certification isn’t another standard, it’s the status quo. New construction projects often pursue certifications, but retrofits and renovations, where much of the building stock lies, are left behind. If the future of healthy buildings is to be inclusive, it must tackle the harder challenge of upgrading existing spaces, not just celebrating new ones.
Occupants as Interviewers
Dave Wildman flipped the script on how organizations should approach leasing. Instead of just analyzing square footage, rents, and amenities, tenants should interview landlords about their long-term sustainability goals. The health of the people in those buildings depends on whether landlords align their strategies with occupant values. It’s a reminder that due diligence should extend beyond dollars per square foot to commitments per human being.
Policy Incentives for Acceleration
Jennifer Berthelot-Jelovic offered a provocative idea: what if governments actively incentivized healthy building practices? Imagine WELL-pursuing projects moving to the front of the line for permits, or gaining tax breaks and fee exemptions. These kinds of carrots, alongside regulatory sticks, could rapidly accelerate adoption by making wellness the path of least resistance.
Raising the Minimum: Why “Code Compliance” Isn’t Enough
Perhaps the most urgent challenge came from Professor Chris Pyke. He highlighted the absurdity that building codes represent the absolute minimum performance we’re willing to accept. Codes are not aspirational; they are baselines. Yet, improving beyond them often feels like a battle.A handful of buildings perform exceptionally well for people nearly all the time. But the vast majority languish in mediocrity. As Pyke put it, it’s “weird” that we fight to justify incremental improvements when we should be demanding ambitious performance as the norm.
Common Threads: A Call to Action
Across the summit, several themes emerged:Healthy buildings are a moral, economic, and cultural imperative.Technology is not the barrier—policy and willpower are.Occupants have more power than they realize.Small improvements can deliver outsized results.Retrofits matter as much as new construction.Policy incentives could accelerate adoption.We must move beyond minimum codes to demand excellence.The question, then, is not whether healthy buildings are possible. They are. The question is whether we, collectively, will demand and deliver them.