A building is not sustainable unless it contributes to improving the health of the occupants. By the end of August 2022, more than 600 million people have been infected, and about 6.5 million have died from COVID-19. An immense number of studies have been conducted and published in the fields of General Internal Medicine and Public Environmental and Occupational Health. However, little attention has been paid to the physical characteristics of the built environment where all the interactions between people and in particular airborne transmission of COVID-19 take place. This article aims to conduct a review of the effects of ventilation and air conditioning on the spread of COVID-19 worldwide. The paper makes a review of the building design solutions for infection prevention in the history of architecture and discusses the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of air conditioning on the prevalence of COVID-19. This review puts together the available empirical evidence to explain why there is a need to reconsider the building design approaches in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a post-COVID era.