Published by Paula Baker-Laporte under Green Living

First in a series titled The Healthy Home Corner.

For this first in a series, I would like to tell you a little about myself and the journey that has led me to specialize in the design of biological homes. This path began in 1972 when, with a good handle on math, a love of art, but very little understanding of architecture, I happened upon the University of Toronto School of Architecture — almost by chance.

There I began a life-long inquiry into what makes space both beautiful and good. Fast forward to 1992: I was a practicing architect in Santa Fe with a troubling and mysterious chronic illness that had eluded diagnosis for years, though I had seen many doctors.

Finally my new physician, client, and soon-to-be dear friend, Erica Elliott, discovered what was wrong with me. She too was troubled by a constellation of disabling symptoms that had eluded diagnosis by her colleagues, and discovering the nature of her own ills led to understanding mine.

Although the particular array of symptoms was quite different for each of us, she perceived that they both had the same root cause: chemical overexposure had made us hypersensitive. Subsequent testing proved her theory to be correct. A person with multiple chemical sensitivity ( MCS), as the condition is called, becomes symptomatic at very low levels of exposure to a wide variety of toxins, allergens and even electromagnetic fields commonly found in our modern world.

My symptoms included fatigue, frequent respiratory infection, hypersensitivity to certain odors, muscular pain, increased food allergies, and poor digestion.

Aside from not feeling well most of the time, the more monumental realization was that, as an architect who frequented homes under construction, I was constantly being exposed to, and made sick by, toxic chemicals from the thousands of products and building materials used in new home construction. I reasoned that if these chemicals so devastated me then they must also affect others, including the factory workers where these products were produced, the contractors who installed them and prospective new home owners.

I felt an ethical duty to become fully informed so that I could protect my clients. I researched different aspects of building that could affect human health. I gathered information about the chemical composition of conventional construction materials and sought out healthier alternatives. I also studied building science and gained understanding of current building practices that could lead to “sick” buildings through mold growth, accumulation of combustion bi-products or lack of proper ventilation.

In addition Dr. Elliott and I engaged in endless discussions combining her medical knowledge with my design/building knowledge, to see how we could help already ill people create safer environments.

I received many calls from chemically sensitive North Americans everywhere, people who needed information. In response to these countless inquiries in 1997 I teamed up with Dr. Erica Elliott and John Banta, an experienced “house doctor,” to write “Prescriptions for a Healthy House.” We mined the architecture, medicine and building science ensemble, so as to explain why healthier homes were necessary — as well as how to build them.

In 2008 the third edition of our book was released. My long personal journey back to health has been a successful one. The term “Green Building” has become common parlance. Many people in the building industry have worked hard to produce systems for assessing the “greenness” of buildings. These scorecards almost always contain a section on “indoor environmental quality” and require or reward reduction of the use of toxins in construction and the introduction of better mechanical ventilation for the home.

However, health has become a small subcategory of a larger agenda. The main emphasis, in the green building movement, is to create more-energy efficient homes. Saving the planet from the excessive consumption of human beings is the driving force; still, a green rating does not guarantee that a home will support and nurture its occupants’ health, or that someone suffering from MCS or asthma will be able to live in that home.

In my quest for healthier ways to build I discovered Building Biology, a building philosophy and science that originated in Germany in the early 1960s as Bau-Biologie. At that time, long before we recognized the problem in North America, it was becoming alarmingly evident in Europe that a growing segment of their population was chronically unwell from being indoors in the mass-produced industrialized housing that went up after WWII. With an ancient building history and surrounded by historical buildings, a multi-disciplinary gathering of concerned professionals systematically compared newer construction techniques with the solid, often earthen, pre-war building stock.

What resulted was a set of scientific standards for evaluating indoor environmental quality and 25 principles for building new homes and workplaces.  In Northern Europe Bau-Biologie has come to be synonymous with built environments that are healthy and ecologically sound. Born from its unique sociological and building context, the movement developed a standard for health and ecology that is fundamentally different from the way we have approached “green” in North America. I believe it holds some very relevant answers for us.

Building Biology views the natural environment as the gold standard against which built environments should be measured. It honors the genius of nature and notes the failure of industrialized building technology to create vital environments with the synthetic materials that are so prevalent in conventional construction today. An important precept of Building Biology is that “there is a direct correlation between the biological compatibility of a home and its ecological performance.” In other words, environments that are deeply nurturing to human health excel in ecological performance by their very nature.

In Santa Fe we are fortunate to have a wide array of alternatives to conventional construction. While earthen homes are viewed with suspicion throughout most of the nation, here they are appreciated and sought after. It was only after studying Building Biology that I began to understand our local treasure of traditional and alternative home building culture. It was only after living in a natural home built according to these principles that that theory translated into positive daily experience.

Paula Baker-Laporte FAIA (paula@econest.com) is an architect and a certified building biology practitioner. She is the principal of Baker-Laporte and Associates and EcoNest Design. She is primary author of “Prescriptions for a Healthy House” and co-author with husband Robert Laporte of “Econest-Creating Sustainable Sanctuaries of Clay, Straw and Timber”

(Reprinted courtesy of Santa Fe Real Estate Guide.)