Modern glass-paneled office buildings may look spiffy on the outside, but health hazards may be concealed within their airtight walls. (Jimmy Lin)

According to a survey by the Architecture and Building Research Institute (ABRI), 82% of office workers in Taiwan frequently experience headaches, fatigue, nausea or drowsiness at the office, with 12% feeling unwell on a daily basis. Oddly enough, such symptoms usually disappear without treatment once people leave the office.

Many managers attribute such phenomena to employee laziness, but this could be a great misunderstanding: the real culprit for workplace lethargy followed by after-work energy may in fact be stagnant air in the office. Such nonspecific ailments caused by poor air quality inside buildings are known as “sick building syndrome.” In mild cases people may feel ill, but in serious cases they may suffer allergies, loss of drive, or chronic respiratory diseases; it may even significantly increase the risk of cancer.

In November 2011, the legislature passed the Indoor Air Quality Management Act, officially expanding Taiwan’s war against air pollution from the outdoors to the indoors.

Opened in 1991, the Kao­hsiung City Hall building is Kao­hsiung’s administrative center, and an essential place for Kao­hsiung residents to do official business.

However, not long after the building opened, employees and temporary visitors alike would start to feel lightheaded and drowsy in the afternoons, with some even complaining of sore throats, itching and postnasal drip. The worst area of all was the Public Works Bureau’s Building Administration Office on the first floor.

After this situation had persisted for a while, city officials asked National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) architecture professor and green architecture research pioneer Chiang Che-ming, along with experts in remodeling and architecture, to investigate. They found that within the tightly closed-off first-floor office space, the carbon dioxide concentration often reached 700–800 parts per million, while that in the conference room exceeded 1,000 ppm. Generally, when the CO2 concentration exceeds 600 ppm, people tend to feel stuffy and sleepy; over 1,000 ppm, and breathing, circulation and brain function are affected, even to the point of vomiting.

More astonishingly, the formaldehyde concentration in the Kao­hsiung City Hall building, which had been in use for nearly 20 years, exceeded the safety standard of 0.1 ppm. (Formaldehyde, rated by the World Health Organization as a Group 1 chemical carcinogen, is often used in construction materials.) This was a worrisome situation.