Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity

by Joseph G. Allen, John D. Macomber

Overview

A New York Times Favorite Book of the Year for Healthy Living
A Fortune Best Book of the Year
An AIA New York Book of the Year

“This book should be essential reading for all who commission, design, manage, and use buildings—indeed anyone who is interested in a healthy environment.”
—Norman Foster

As schools and businesses around the world consider when and how to reopen their doors to fight COVID-19, the Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and Harvard Business School’s leading expert on urban resilience reveal what you can do to harness the power of your offices, homes, and schools to protect your health—and boost every aspect of your performance and well-being.

Ever feel tired during a meeting? That’s because most conference rooms are not bringing in enough fresh air. When that door opens, it literally breathes life back into the room. But there is a lot more acting on your body that you can’t feel or see. From our offices and homes to schools, hospitals, and restaurants, the indoor spaces where we work, learn, play, eat, and heal have an outsized impact on our performance and well-being. They affect our creativity, focus, and problem-solving ability and can make us sick—jeopardizing our future and dragging down profits in the process.

Charismatic pioneers of the healthy building movement who have paired up to combine the cutting-edge science of Harvard’s School of Public Health with the financial know-how of the Harvard Business School, Joseph Allen and John Macomber make a compelling case in this urgently needed book for why every business and home owner should make certain relatively low-cost investments a top priority. Grounded in exposure and risk science and relevant to anyone newly concerned about how their surroundings impact their health, Healthy Buildings can help you evaluate the impact of small, easily controllable environmental fluctuations on your immediate well-being and long-term reproductive and lung health. It shows how our indoor environment can have a dramatic impact on a whole host of higher order cognitive functions—including things like concentration, strategic thinking, troubleshooting, and decision-making. Study after study has found that your performance will dramatically improve if you are working in optimal conditions (with high rates of ventilation, few damaging persistent chemicals, and optimal humidity, lighting and noise control). So what would it take to turn that knowledge into action?

Cutting through the jargon to explain complex processes in simple and compelling language, Allen and Macomber show how buildings can both expose you to and protect you from disease. They reveal the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building, share insider tips, and show how tracking what they call “health performance indicators” with smart technology can boost a company’s performance and create economic value. With decades of practice in protecting worker health, they offer a clear way forward right now, and show us what comes next in a post-COVID world. While the “green” building movement introduced important new efficiencies, it’s time to look beyond the four walls—placing the decisions we make around buildings into the larger conversation around development and health, and prioritizing the most important and vulnerable asset of any building: its people.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674237971
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,069,226
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Joseph G. Allen is Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and Associate Professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. A renowned forensic investigator of “sick buildings” and frequent keynote speaker, he advises leading companies around the world on healthy building strategies. A key voice in communicating the science of COVID transmission to the public, he has appeared on CBS, CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg, and has written many influential pieces for the Washington Post, New York Times, Atlantic, and USA Today. He is Chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission Task Force on Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel.

John D. Macomber is Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and a world leader on the financing of resilience. He is the author of dozens of HBS case studies on infrastructure projects, focusing on office buildings in the United States, housing in India, water management in Mexico, and private sector–led new cities in Asia.

Table of Contents

Preface: Why This Book? vii

I The Case for Healthy Buildings

1 Who Are We and Why Should You Care? 3

2 The Global Mega-changes Shaping Our World, Our Buildings, .and Us 22

3 Why Are We Ignoring the 90 Percent? 38

4 Putting the Building to Work for You 55

5 Creating and Capturing Value 71

II A Healthy Building Strategy

6 The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building 85

7 Our Global Chemical Experiment 123

8 Healthy Building Certification Systems 147

9 Moving from KPIs to HPIs 175

10 Beyond the Four Wails 200

11 What's Now and What's Next? 217

Conclusion: Buildings, Business, Health, and Wealth 240

Notes 253

Acknowledgments 275

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

We’ve known for years that our indoor environments, from offices to hospitals, can have a dramatic affect on our health, functioning, and mental wellbeing, and 2020 has proven the point…[Allen and Macomber] share insider tips and show how tracking what they call ‘health performance indicators’ with smart technology can boost a company’s performance and create economic value. A post-COVID handbook.

AIA New York - Laura Raskin

This book should be essential reading for all who commission, design, manage, and use buildings—indeed anyone who is interested in a healthy environment.

Norman Foster

In this new era of ESG responsibility, every CEO must consider our built environment to fully meet stakeholder expectations. Joe Allen and John Macomber’s multidisciplinary, accessible approach unlocks the secret to future human health and productivity gains in the very buildings in which we live and work.

Tom Burton

Sustainability and health can no longer exist in separate domains. Healthy Buildings bridges the divide. Allen and Macomber link health science and business science for a new way to think about buildings.

John Mandyck

The engaging conversational style of this comprehensive book makes it an ideal read for any busy building owner or executive who wants to learn about the new science of healthy buildings and to discover how following healthy building strategies may impact their (and society’s) bottom line.

Christoph Reinhart

Healthy Buildings is both hugely important and a great read. By the end it not only completely persuaded me that improving the health of our buildings is a fabulous economic opportunity and something that could change the lives of millions of people—it gave me a very good sense of where to start. Highly recommended.

Rebecca Henderson

This exposé of the widespread under-ventilation and pollution inside modern buildings arrived just as shared indoor space became truly deadly. Though there’s now light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, these insights and guidelines for improving indoor air quality should play a huge role in post-pandemic reforms.

Fortune

Healthy Buildings makes a great contribution by urging us to shift to a ‘health-first’ mindset in relation to our built environment. Its unique insights help close the knowledge gap around healthy buildings, reveal their important role in global sustainability, and provide practical guidance on the main factors we should all be on the lookout for in our homes, offices, and schools.

Cristina Gamboa

A lucid and passionate outline of why now is the time to acknowledge the huge and unrealized potential for buildings to make a positive contribution to the health and performance of their inhabitants, the economy, society and the planet. In this sense, this is a very different and innovative book compared with other similarly themed ones…This is a powerful and enjoyable book, which will appeal to those with an interest in business and built environment alike…Both a relatable and authoritative read.

Buildings & Cities - Marcella Ucci

The manual for keeping people safe indoors.

Boston Globe

Indoor air quality directly impacts our lungs, and we have a responsibility to remove indoor air pollutants that are linked to asthma, lung cancer, and other serious diseases. Healthy Buildings lays out the simple steps we can all take to improve our health.

Harold Wimmer

If we’ve learned anything from the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that clean indoor air is essential to healthy living. But it’s not just about getting rid of viral particles. Dr. Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard, has led research showing that poor indoor air quality dulls your brain, dampening creativity and cognitive function…This book is a call to action for every developer, building owner, shareholder, chief executive, manager, teacher, worker and parent to start demanding healthy buildings with cleaner indoor air.

New York Times - Tara Parker-Pope

Allen and Macomber want to establish national standards, and they make a series of precise and persuasive recommendations for everything from insulation and window shades to water filters and vacuum cleaners.

New Yorker - Jill Lepore