Reimagining Residential Buildings: Design, Ventilation and Health in the Era of Climate Change and Pandemics

Residential buildings must now be designed and retrofitted as adaptive climate–health–work systems rather than as static housing units. This structured literature review synthesises peer-reviewed journal and conference evidence on residential taxonomy, ventilation, indoor environmental quality, overheating, airborne infection resilience, post-pandemic occupancy changes and future performance benchmarks. The review shows that single-family and multifamily buildings remain the most practical first-order categories because they differ in envelope exposure, ventilation pathways, system ownership, governance, retrofit feasibility and occupant control. Single-family dwellings generally provide greater household autonomy, roof-based renewable potential and room-level intervention flexibility, but can also carry higher envelope losses, lower density and stronger dependence on occupant operation. Multifamily buildings benefit from compactness and shared infrastructure, yet face additional risks from common services, vertical shafts, stack effects, corridor pressurisation, inter-zonal airflow and collective maintenance. Ventilation evidence indicates that natural, exhaust-only, supply, balanced heat-recovery, hybrid, demand-controlled and filtration-based strategies cannot be ranked universally; their effectiveness depends on climate, airtightness, pollutant source, occupancy, maintenance and governance. This review further shows that overheating, cooling-demand growth, airborne infection preparedness and remote work are shifting residential performance from winter-centric energy efficiency toward year-round thermal resilience, clean-air delivery and prolonged-occupancy functionality. A future taxonomy is therefore proposed around adaptive performance attributes, including thermal resilience, clean-air capacity, ventilation controllability, energy flexibility, remote-work readiness, vulnerability and retrofit potential. The core contribution is a hypothesis-generating, decision-support and benchmark-development framework for aligning residential design, retrofit and policy with health, indoor environmental quality, energy efficiency and carbon performance.