To Make a Building Healthier, Stop Sanitizing Everything
Improve the ventilation, even spread some good germs. If you want people to be healthy and productive, tend the microbiome.
Photo Illustration: 731; Photos: Agefoto; Library of Congress; Science Source
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, 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?’ ”