how to heal a building

open the windows. stop the obsessive sanitizing. spread some good germs around. a building, like a person, is only as healthy as its microbiome

- caroline winter

Four years ago a doctoral student in architecture asked Luke Leung to help him come up with a thesis topic. Leung, an engineer whose projects include the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, proposed the question: What is heaven?

“The student did a lot of research and found that no matter the faith—Islam, Judaism, Christianity—heaven is always a place with a garden and running water,” recalls Leung, director of the sustainable engineering studio of Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, the architectural behemoth better known as SOM. “So then we started questioning, ‘If that is heaven, what exactly is the place we are living in?’ ”

In the Western world, humans spend 90% of their time indoors. The average American spends even more than that— 93%—inside buildings or cars. For years scientists have sounded the alarm that our disconnect from the outdoors is linked to a host of chronic health problems, including allergies, asthma, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and obesity. More recently, experts in various fields have begun studying why buildings, even those designed to be as germ-free as possible, are vectors for disease, not the least Covid-19.

“There was a study of more than 7,300 cases in China, and guess how many people caught the disease outdoors?” Leung asks. “Just two.” Early testing following Black Lives Matter protests in Minnesota also suggested that transmission of SARS-CoV-2 outside is rare, even when thousands of people gather, talking, yelling, and chanting—at least when most of those people wear masks. Out of more than 13,000 protesters tested, only 1.8% were positive. Other states showed similar results.