Inside OUT: Human Health and the Air-Conditioning Era [Paperback]

In this extraordinary book, McCormick and collaborators help us to understand the new environment we have created, indoors, from the perspectives of history and architecture. If you would like to understand the spaces in which you spend nearly all of your waking and sleeping hours, how they affect you and how they came to be the way they are, read Inside OUT.  

-     Rob Dunn, biologist, author of A Natural History of the Future

Introduction 1. Air Quality andHuman Health.  2. The Socially Constructed Microbiome.  3. The Microscopic World of Building Science.  4. The Building/Occupant Organism.  5. Designing with Metrics for Indoor Air Quality, Comfort, and Health.  6. Respiratory Equity.  7. Transcript of Panel Discussion: Inside/Out Symposium.  8. Reconciling Inside and Out. 

Inside OUT: Human Health and the Air-Conditioning Era focuses on the enclosed environment of fully conditioned buildings, revealing a unique ecosystem with broad implications for human life and a rapidly expanding global footprint. Emphasizing the interconnections between buildings and human health, equity, and environmental sustainability, it presents an interdisciplinary, holistic analysis of the social, behavioral, and technological issues of indoor space.

Over the 20th century, advances in mechanical conditioning technologies led to the dispersion and international dominance of the sealed building envelope, which casually and progressively disconnected buildings and their occupants from local climatic, biological, and cultural environments. At the same time, humans were increasingly pushed indoors by less tangible, socially constructed forces that associated climate control with cleanliness, health, social status, alc+