An architect with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity writes about architecture, medicine and building science to explain why healthier homes are necessary — as well as how to build them.
Paula Baker-Laporte was a practicing architect in 1992 when she was was plagued by a “mysterious chronic illness,” later diagnosed as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
“My symptoms included fatigue, frequent respiratory infection, hypersensitivity to certain odors, muscular pain, increased food allergies, and poor digestion,” she writes in an article at Green By Design. “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.”
Her quest for information about the chemical composition of conventional construction materials led her to seek out healthier alternatives, and eventually, with two partners (the doctor who diagnosed her MCS and an experienced “house doctor”), write the book 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,” she writes.
Link to Paula Baker-Laporte’s full article Healthy Home Design at Green by Design.
Paula Baker-Laporte
Paula Baker-Laporte FAIA 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”
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