Benjamin Franklin once professed, “I am persuaded that no common air from without is so unwholesome as the air within a close room that has been often breathed and not changed.” 250 years on and modern science is successfully proving that founding father’s idea. A recent pair of harvard studies has given further credence to the theory that clean air makes us more productive. Joseph Allen, assistant professor and director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, along with his colleagues Jack Spengler and Piers MacNaughton, and collaborators Suresh Santanam at Syracuse University and Usha Satish at SUNY Upstate Medical, investigated this long held theory. For the first phase of their study, they enrolled 24 “knowledge workers,” that is managers, architects, and designers, to spend six days, over a two-week period, in a highly controlled work environment at the Syracuse Center of Excellence. Each day they requested participants go about their normal work routine from 9am to […]