Peter Wehrwein
Fresh paint. If optimism had a smell, it would be the smell of fresh paint. And the 35,000-square-feet of concrete floor, which somehow wound up in packed-to-the-gills Boston, would stretch out like some wayward piece of the Dakotas. Rows of cement columns, featureless and stolid except for an oddly graceful flare at the top, stand guard as Jack Spengler ambles through a space that he hopes will show that a Harvard environmental health scientist and indoor air expert can practice what he preaches. "I spent the first 25 years of my career identifying problems," says Spengler, S.M.'73, the Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation and one of the world's leading experts on indoor air pollution. "Now I want to work on how to solve them."
Two large groups in the School's Department of Environmental Health-environmental epidemiology and environmental science and engineering--and part of the Department of Health and Social Behavior are moving. They are leaving the School's main campus on Huntington Avenue and setting up shop in the Landmark Center, a spectacularly renovated Art Deco building originally constructed as a warehouse for Sears Roebuck. With a supporting cast that includes Paul Riccardi, dean of administration and operations, Danny Beaudoin, manager of energy and utilities, and Steve Hurley of Janovsky/Hurley Architects, Spengler is masterminding the planning of the new offices. The main goal: make the new space as attractive and environmentally healthy as possible for the 250 or so people who will work there. "The idea is to give people a reason to want to come here," says Spengler.
To that end, he had students design a common area and positioned the faculty offices to allow as much natural light as possible to reach the cubicles used by staff and students. Energy-saving features include a motion-- and light-sensitive lighting system that will switch on and off depending on how much other light is in the room and whether people are present. The walls and furniture are completely modular, which cuts back on building materials in case of any remodeling. White noise will be used to muffle background noise and chatter. Spengler says the biggest challenge has been the ventilation system, which is being built below the floor. Not only does bottom-up ventilation save energy because the air doesn't have to be cooled as much or blown as hard to create good circulation, it is also probably healthier than the ceiling ventilation systems in most buildings. When air is blown into a room from above, it creates drafts and may help spread airborne dust, infectious agents, and other indoor pollutants. Floor ventilation is common in older homes and buildings in Europe, but Spengler believes that "we will be among the first to design it for such a big space in a renovated building in the United States."
Spengler came to the School in 1971 as a research associate in one of the most outdoor of subjects, meteorology. There were some familiar footsteps on this career path: his father, Ken Spengler, was long-time executive director of the American Meteorological Society. Raindrops were an early interest. The first item on his curriculum vitae is "Investigating freely suspended water drop interactions with high-speed photography," in the Journal of the Society for Motion Picture and Television Engineers. As he tells it, Spengler was inspired to get out of rain and into indoor air research by data from the School's famous Six Cities study, which revealed that many people in supposedly clean--air cities were breathing air almost as foul as the air in cities presumed to have dirty air. Even if the outdoor air was relatively pristine, smoke from wood-burning stoves, cigarettes, and other pollutants made the air inside homes filthy--and people spend a large amount of time exposed to indoor air. "It became fundamental to the science to unravel the indoor from the outdoor exposures," explains Spengler. He was hooked.
Public health researchers had ventured indoors before, especially at the School. Celebrated faculty members like Alice Hamilton and Philip Drinker studied various aspects of indoor air, toxins, and respiratory health. Spengler makes a point of invoking the contributions of Constantin Yaglou, a faculty member in the '20s and '30s. Using room-sized chambers, Yaglou calculated how much airflow is needed to keep people comfortable. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, humidity, and, as Spengler likes to point out, body odor were measured. (After several men were cooped up inside a chamber for a certain length of time, a panel rated the smell. The process was performed for different temperature and ventilation rates.) Yaglou's results were the basis for American ventilation standards for decades.
But Spengler and his colleagues are doing research that is a marked departure from the past. They have focused on the home, not just the workplace. Instead of artificial environments like Yaglou's chambers, they study real-world exposures using sophisticated epidemiologic methods to control the many variables. But the most important difference might be in the subject matter: the indoor environments themselves. Construction techniques and energy conservation have made buildings "tighter" and less forgiving. Computers add massive amounts of heat. Thrown into the caldron are the emissions from synthetic materials used to make furniture and carpet, giving you a forbidding environment to work and live in--and to study. Professor Harriet Burge has done groundbreaking work relating fungi, dust mites, cockroaches, and cat allergens to asthma. Associate Professor Donald Milton has shown how ventilation and outdoor air supply affect employee sick days and the spread of infectious diseases. Spengler is the first author on a couple dozen papers documenting indoor exposure to a slew of pollutants. His work documenting high nitrogen dioxide levels in indoor skating arenas has garnered a great deal of attention. And he has written dozens of review papers. The publication of the Indoor Air Quality Handbook earlier this year puts a capstone on his prolific career. Edited by Spengler, Jonathan Samet, S.M.'77, and John F. McCarthy, S.M.'78, it is a massive book that collects much of what is currently known about indoor air pollution into one volume. Spengler says he and his colleagues at the School deserve credit for integrating the study of indoor air pollution and "making it a legitimate field of public health research."
Public health research is dense stuff, dependent on numbers and tinged with moral purpose. Those attributes, combined with its fundamentally prudent message of prevention, means it isn't often associated with, well, just having fun. But as he was showing a couple of visitors around the unfinished space at the Landmark Center recently, Spengler had that special, light-footed energy of someone who's having a ball. He was ecstatic when he saw the space set aside for bikes in the rooftop parking lot. He clowned around when it came time to have his picture taken and took some pictures with his own camera. He went uninvited into the insurance company offices on the same floor to see how they had been designed. "I would have loved to have been an architect," he says with a good-natured laugh. "That is the common dream--an architect or a writer." But practicing what you preach is risky business. A new or revised theory or finding means another journal article, grant application, or study analysis. What Spengler is doing with this office space is more or less permanent, and he has a large and demanding audience. "I have some anxiety, sure," he says, coming to earth. "This space at Landmark is an experiment of sorts. Can we be wiser in our use of materials and energy while creating a productive and healthy work environment that functions to enhance our research and education? Landmark will be our 'living laboratory' where we are strangely both subjects and researchers."
Harvard Public Health Review Winter 2002/text version
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