Most of us want our homes to be comfortable, beautiful, and supportive places to live. Who doesn’t? But until recently, very few people thought about how our home environments affect our health and wellness, which is one of the reasons most people have never heard of Building Biology. It was developed after World War II, when the way homes were being built began shifting away from more traditional methods.
It Started in Postwar Germany
After World War II, Germany faced an enormous housing shortage and millions of homes needed to be rebuilt. Before the war, homes were more commonly constructed with natural materials such as wood, brick, stone, and plaster. The reconstruction brought increased use of newer building methods and prefabricated materials, including particleboard, synthetic adhesives, plastics, insulation, and solvent-based paints and finishes, to name a few.
These materials made it possible to build homes differently but they also changed the indoor environment. Some of the newer materials released volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other chemicals into the indoor air. As people began reporting health concerns, questions started being asked about the relationship between the buildings and the health of the people living in them.
Bau Biologie, which translates to Building Biology, developed out of those concerns. The health of the people living inside the building became part of how the building itself was considered.
Looking at the Home as a Whole Environment
Instead of looking at a house simply as a structure, Building Biology looks at the environment created inside and around it. That includes things such as indoor air, moisture and mold, chemical emissions from building materials and furnishings, water, and the electrical and electromagnetic environment.
The value of looking at these things together is that this is how we actually experience our homes. We don’t live inside one building material or interact with one environmental factor at a time. The building, its systems, the things we bring into it, the conditions that develop over time, and the way we live in the space all exist together. Looking at one issue in isolation can give you information, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what that information means in the context of the whole environment.
Building Biology Comes to the United States
Building Biology eventually made its way to the United States in the 1970s through German architect Helmut Ziehe, who later founded the International Institute for Bau-Biologie & Ecology. The field continued developing as our homes continued changing, and modern homes now contain materials, products, systems, and technologies that would have been unfamiliar in homes built generations ago.
Think about what goes into a typical home today:
- Engineered wood products
- Adhesives
- Synthetic flooring and furnishings
- Paints and finishes
- HVAC systems
- Electronics and wireless technology,
- And the list goes on
Our indoor environment is more complex than we might think, and I believe it’s something worth paying attention to.
In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency estimates we spend approximately 90 percent of our time indoors and the air quality inside of our homes is typically two to five times higher than outside!
We can be exposed to hundreds of toxins inside our own homes on a daily basis, and most of these are linked to illness. Given how much of our lives we spend inside, our homes should be included in the broader conversation about health and wellness.
What Building Biology Taught Me to See
When my own health led me to Building Biology more than a decade ago, one of the biggest shifts was realizing how many things I had never thought about in my own home. I had always considered myself health-conscious. I exercised, paid attention to what I ate, and did many of the things we’re told to do to take care of ourselves. I hadn’t really thought about my house.
Building Biology gave me the foundation for looking at the home as a whole environment and its own ecosystem. More than a decade of working with hundreds of homes has added another layer to that foundation because I’ve seen how much context can change the meaning of what you find. Once you know how many things could be evaluated in a home, it would be very easy to turn healthy-home living into a never-ending project. And trust me, I can find things to change in almost any home. That doesn’t mean they all deserve the same amount of your attention, though.
This is one place where my thinking has changed with experience. Learning that something in your home is a source of exposure is useful information, but that fact by itself doesn’t tell you the whole story. You still have to understand what is happening in that particular home, how significant it is in context, what else is going on, and whether it should be prioritized compared with everything else.
I’ve made changes in my own home that I later realized weren’t worth the money, disruption, or loss of things I genuinely enjoyed because I was focused on reducing an exposure as much as possible. I didn’t have the perspective then that I have now. Experience has made me much more discerning about the difference between identifying something that isn’t ideal and deciding what that information actually means.
Why Building Biology Still Matters
After more than a decade in this field, I still believe strongly in one of the fundamental ideas behind Building Biology: your home is an environment, and that environment deserves our attention. But I don’t believe that means you need to become afraid of your house, identify every possible problem, or try to create a perfectly “non-toxic” home.
There is a lot of room between overlooking your home environment and trying to control every possible exposure inside it. For me, that middle ground has become the most important part of this work. The goal isn’t to see how many things you can find wrong with your house and address them. It’s about understanding your environment well enough to recognize what actually needs to be addressed and make informed decisions about it.
And that is where Building Biology becomes much more useful than a list of things to avoid. It gives us a way to start looking at the home as part of the bigger health picture, while experience and context help us understand what to do with what we find.
If you want to continue from here, read [What Does a Healthy Home Actually Mean?] next. That’s where I get into how my own thinking about creating a healthier home has changed after more than a decade of doing this work.