Healthy Buildings, Productive People

than 90 percent of our time inside, but builders in general have paid little attention to the health aspects of indoor spaces, instead focusing on superficial design features and on meeting minimum environmental standards to keep costs down. B Researchers at Harvard University in the US looked at the effects of indoor air quality on workers' cognitive performance — important both for health and for companies' bottom lines, says Joseph Allen, assistant professor of environmental health and principal investigator of the studies. 'The true cost of running our buildings should take into account the health and productivity of people in those buildings,' Allen says. In fact, an analysis by the team showed that the cost of making alterations that could boost cognitive performance significantly was minuscule compared with the related increase in productivity — about $40 per person, per year, compared with a $6,500 increase in employee productivity. C The team's first study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, was conducted at the Syracuse Center of Excellence, a US research organization devoted to studying and developing sustainability. The center houses a laboratory that allows researchers to test a wide range of…