Teleworking because it is too hot in the office, it is the daily life of certain employees who pay a design unsuitable for global warming of office buildings, often glazed.
“It is cooler at home than here, it is infernal, I am on the verge of going to buy survival covers”, laments an employee of the real estate sector who did not wish to give her identity.
However, his workplace has nothing to do with a restaurant kitchen, but his office, one meter from a bay window on the south, displays 29 degrees, five more degrees as the offices behind the eastern facade of the same building.
Completely glazed, the building located in the Austerlitz district of Paris, was built in the early 2000s, and is a typical example of overheating buildings in summer, denounced by engineer Pascal Lenormand via a hashtag #BalanceTonfour, created in 2023 on social networks.
For this energy performance expert in buildings, when the glass surface exceeds 30% of the floor surface of a room, “it starts to become dangerous”.
For aesthetic and economic reasons, the glass buildings have been largely won since the end of the last century, like the Defense business district, west of Paris. But if they bring light in the vast workspaces, they are less and less suitable for hot weather.
The 38-year-old Romain company has been installed for two years in a defense coworking building, renovated in the late 2010s. “It was brand new but it was very hot very quickly, they had to put the air conditioning thoroughly,” he explains.
“We are bursting hot, there are bay windows on all floors”, plague Adrien, 49, who works in the same building. Under the high temperatures in mid-August “a colleague cracked, she said that her mobile phone had died because of the heat,” he explains.
– “not enough” –
The subject of “adaptation to global warming is still emerging” in office real estate, tells AFP Juliette Lefébure, director general of the Observatory of Sustainable Real Estate (OID), an association of real estate professionals engaged in the ecological transition of the sector.
“Today it is rather the challenges of decarbonation (reduction of carbonated energy consumption, editor’s note) which are at the heart of buildings renovation projects, and not adaptation”, adds Gaëlle Peschoux, project manager within the OID.
The latest regulations that have come into force, at the French and European level, have forced a certain number of actors to look at the issue of risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, floods, etc.
This taking into account, however, depends on “the size of the company, its portfolio and its means, there is real inequality in the face of climate change”, according to Thierry Laquitaine, director of investment socially responsible for the AEW real estate fund manager.
The Institute of the Economy for Climate (i4ce) assessed the annual investment needs in France to adapt buildings, including housing, with heat waves to between “1 to 2.5 billion euros for new construction and 4.8 billion for renovation”, in addition to investments to achieve carbon neutrality objectives.
It cites orientations compared to the poorly thought out sun, unsuitable dark colors or a choice of materials that do not prevent the temperature transmission between exterior and interior enough.
“The buildings are notoriously much better isolated than before,” says Maxime Michaux, director of engineering for JLL real estate advisor, thanks to more efficient materials.
But even the environmental regulations for the new construction which entered into force in 2022 (RE2020) “is not sufficient”, according to the director general of the OID.
In addition to the unreasonable appeal to air conditioning to refresh poorly designed buildings, the problem “is above all the endangerment of people”, warns Pascal Lenormand, for whom “the most dramatic situations are those of hospitals”.
Posted on August 18 at 8:41 a.m., AFP