How demanding is global approach to indoor environmental quality assessment ?

The indoor environmental quality of a building is intended as the thermal, visual, acoustic and indoor air quality performances as a whole, which provide health and comfort for occupants. In architecture, global approach to environmental quality design is necessary. High levels of quality are needed for each aspect, even though design requirements may at times be opposed. In order to determine opportunities and limits of global approach, problems related to visual and acoustic comfort assessment were examined for a baroque church in Italy. Visual and acoustical comfort parameters were obtained by means of experimental and numerical analyses. As far as numerical analysis two demanding codes, RAMSETE and LIGHTSCAPE, were used for simulation. The outcome of this work seems to indicate that global approach is still too demanding to be performed by a rofessional. The time required, software complexity, lack of simulation data, coupled with the high level of expertise necessary, are the limits for which the integrated environmental analysis comes to be applied only to research ambit.