When I think of "Safe" for air, I also think of PM2.5 and other airborne compounds. A more permanent fix to make the air fully safe is improving building ventilation.
There's an almost blind focus on one dimension of a multi-dimensional problem. Yes, buildings should be designed to be more energy and environmentally efficient; where it makes sense. However there are many assumptions in 'building code' that evolved around implicit properties in the materials and methods used in the past.
A more comprehensive evaluation would consider numerous factors and choose trade-offs.
What is the (exterior) difference in impact between using different quantities and combinations of building materials? How do those materials need to be maintained or replaced over the life of the building? Over it's demolition? Can they be recycled or otherwise recovered?
How do the used materials and shapes effect the operational energy for the intended use of the building (over the intended, and likely, lifetimes)?
It looks like a 2014 update to LEED finally 'considers indoor environmental quality'. "... the IEQ category addresses thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort as well as indoor air quality."
However my opinion is that they've put the cart before the horse. Surely you've seen office environments where someone doesn't like 'how cold' the building is; so they use a personal heater to blow directly on themselves. Or utilize an air filtration system for one room because it's impossible to clean the ventilation ducts. It also fails to consider containment of emissions from chemical / cleaning or other smelly areas.
The acoustic angle is also critically important for apartments and condos. One of _the_ major reasons I and many others have grown to hate living in them revolves around __noise__. There are many memes about marching bands and various other sadistic neighbors on any adjacent side, particularly upstairs.
If you want people to _want_ to move to apartments and condos, then they need to be built so they're desirable. That includes 'cave of solitude' level of audio isolation. Fresh air that doesn't have the cooking or laundry smells; or worse the trash chute leaking out because someone didn't setup the pressure system correctly. It also includes no more free-for-all parking and enough spaces for the cars people will bring with them from the suburbs. (Which might be as many as 2 per adult on average!) The car angle might be solved at the same time as municipal parking, if a big enough, and well secured enough, lot exists as an IO/interface with the surrounding areas. That level of thinking combined with people-mover sidewalks along pedestrian arterials will help us move towards 'Cave of Steel' like cities.
Yes, absolutely this. Ever since I was a kid playing Sim City and seeing the Arcologies I dreamed of living in a high rise apartment. Eventually in my 30s I was able to do so, and the whole experience was terrible. Sure, the place looked great in photos. But the lint and smells from laundry, cooking, weed, bathrooms, etc. all got funneled into my unit, and the soundproofing was nowhere near adequate.
These buildings, if they have operable windows, really need isolated per-unit ventilation systems (with a hydronic loop for heat/cold) and, as you say, dead silent soundproofing.
So now I'm back into a house with no shared walls. It's also poorly built, but it's way quieter way out here than in a city, and overall much higher quality of life. And I can still drive or take a train downtown to access food/etc.
You can have very quiet buildings without masonry. I've lived in a few, all steel framing and drywall with proper sound isolation. It is all in the construction technique. Even purpose-built sound isolation rooms are little more than wood and drywall, properly engineered, anywhere on the planet.
I have never heard of a steel framed / drywall house before. I looked it up and appear they are offered in my country. How does steel make it quieter? I would think steel would transmit more noise than wood.
Soundproofing is about insulation materials, quality doors and building above the minimum. A lot of midrise condos are built to a pretty shitty standard to make the numbers work. Sometimes they do stuff like glue wall panels instead of fastening, so you get things starting to loosen quickly as the building shifts.
If you stay in a decent midrange hotel (Hampton Inn, Marriott, etc) the sound is pretty good. They are prefabricated concrete, but look at the details, surfaces are carpeted, textured ceilings, there are rubber gaskets everywhere, etc. You usually don’t hear the nighttime adventures of your neighbors, but you can smell a bag of popcorn from 50 yards away because ventilation sucks.
The original discussion was about noise in multi-family homes e.g. apartment buildings and high-rises, which tend to be steel beyond a certain height. While there are single-family homes built with steel framing in the US, they are less common; they have some advantages but cost more to build and are more difficult to thermally insulate than wood.
Every multi-family high-rise I've lived in used steel construction and drywall and had excellent sound isolation -- I never hear my neighbors and vice versa.
In fact many professional "sound absorbing panels" you might see in a recording studio or on the walls of movie theaters are made from insulation.
Obviously, if we can greatly improve indoor air quality with only a marginal increase in energy use, that's worth it. But anything else... I don't know! I think it's easy to forget just how big of a deal climate change is!
Moreover, well-built, well-conditioned, comfortable buildings are also very efficient, so the only reason not to build for quality is up-front capital cost, a problem that can be solved with a combination of improved technology and tighter building standards for ventilation and noise.
There should be a way to shop for places to live with an easily comparable air, sound, and comfort quality score, so that there is pressure to improve.
Since most building standards are set by the society of HVAC engineers, there’s a pretty obvious bias, and efficiency people seem to take the bait. We tend to use these systems to make shittier buildings marginally ok for human habitation. Architects care about $/ft for normal buildings and cool looking designs that get them awards for fancy buildings.