Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity

A forensic investigator of “sick buildings” and Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program teams up with a CEO-turned–Harvard Business School professor to reveal the secrets of a healthy building―and unlock one of the greatest business opportunities of our time.

By the time you reach eighty, you will have spent seventy-two years of your life indoors. Like it or not, humans have become an indoor species. This means that the people who design, build, and maintain our buildings can have a major impact on our health.

Ever feel tired during a meeting? That’s because most offices and 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 our schools and hospitals, the indoor spaces where we work, learn, play, eat, and heal have an outsized influence on our performance and wellbeing. They affect our creativity, focus, and problem-solving ability and can make us sick―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 lay out the science of healthy buildings and make the business case for owners, developers, and CEOs. They reveal the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building, and show how tracking health performance indicators with smart technology can boost performance and create economic value. While the “green” building movement tackled energy, waste, and water, the new healthy building movement focuses on the most important (and expensive) asset of any business: its people.