Healthy Buildings

How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity

Joseph G. Allen, John D. Macomber

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674246089
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

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.

PART I

The Case for Healthy Buildings

CHAPTER ONE

Who Are We and Why Should You Care?

The first wealth is health.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

John’s Awakening

I was born to build. Before I could talk, I had trucks and bulldozers in a cornmeal mini-sandbox in the kitchen. I regaled my infant sister by stacking up cantilevered block structures from floor to ceiling. How much width can we get off a single block base? How few units to reach the ceiling?

This aptitude for building is in my DNA, one could say. In 1904 my great-grandfather left a big national construction firm to establish the George B. H. Macomber Company. He built the first structural steel building in Boston (it’s now called 79 Milk Street) and the Weld Boathouse at Harvard before there was a bridge across the Charles River.

The firm passed from father to son in 1927, and then my own father bought the family business in 1959. One of his early projects, the hexagonal “waffle” slab floors at the Yale Art Museum, showcased his ability to think in three dimensions across time. He had to imagine how the finished concrete would look, where the reinforcing steel would go, and (upside down and backward) how the plywood should end up so that he could effectively strip it from the underside without ripping it apart.

My siblings and I bought the family business in 1990 and picked up where Dad left off. I designed formwork for cast-in-place buildings, where stairs might alternate above and below a continuous sidewall made of the same monolithic concrete pour. No easy feat, but the logic of the puzzle appealed to me, just as it had to my father.

My father and I were both natural physical-world problem solvers, and the projects we worked on included high-rise apartment buildings, data centers, and total mechanical rehabilitation of operating hospitals or museums where the walls themselves were part of the collection. I was the chairman and principal stockholder of the George B. H. Macomber Company for about 15 years, working alongside my siblings. We built landmarks all over New England for clients including MIT, Fidelity, State Street, Mass General Hospital, Children’s Hospital, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. We also built dozens of office structures, apartments, and stores for commercial real estate developers.

By 2006, the construction business had become exceptionally competitive, adversarial, and low margin in Boston. I wanted to be a builder, not a full-time litigator and collector of accounts receivable. So my siblings and I sold the business, after four generations and 102 years, and I embarked on a second career as a teacher.

When I first came to Harvard Business School (HBS), I taught two courses. One was Real Property, which is essentially Real Estate 101: how to finance, buy, and flip an office building. It’s taught in the Finance unit at HBS and has an investor-focused orientation. My other course was Real Estate Development, Design, and Construction, jointly listed with Harvard Design School, which got more into the “bricks and sticks” aspect of the industry. I found them both rewarding, of course, but there is not a lot of new academic work going into the purchasing of ceiling tile or the refinancing of an apartment building.

Then two things happened. First, HBS started offering executive education in real estate in India. I was the program chair and I made many trips to India to teach but, more importantly, to do research and write. The subjects of my HBS case studies ranged from water franchising in Gujarat in the Northwest to the redevelopment of informal housing in Mumbai, to low-income housing development in Kolkata in the East, and infrastructure finance nationwide.

It was quite clear that building promoters in India could not rely on the state to provide reliable infrastructure like electricity, consistent clean water, steady sanitation services … or even roads. What’s more, the tools I grew up with—cash flow, concrete, hardhats, and structural...