HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

SPH's Spengler Gets Named Chair

Professor John Spengler of the School of Public Health (SPH) was recently named the Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation.

For 25 years at the SPH, Spengler has studied contaminants in the urban environment, homes, schools, hospitals and offices, as well as transportation systems. The gift from Akira Yamaguchi, in the amount of $3.2 million, will extend Spengler's research to include the implications of health, energy, and materials for sustainable design. Over the next generation, the world will be required to double its housing stock to provide basic shelter for an expanding and migrating population. In the United States, buildings are a major contributor to the use of energy and materials, resulting in air and water pollution, and the solid waste problem. Building ecologically offers the only hope for our collective future, says Spengler.

Yamaguchi builds homes in Japan's north island, Hokkaido. As an apprentice to a master carpenter, he was building temples in his early twenties. In the 1950s he realized that housing would be the key to restructuring Japanese society. He hoped to promote his developing eco-philosophy of "bioregionalism." With wood from Hokkaido's forests, Yamaguchi's homes use ancient Japanese construction techniques to withstand the harsh winter weather and earthquakes of his region. Built to outlast other Japanese homes by 100 years, Akira Yamaguchi is reducing the "ecological footprint" of mankind.

Under the auspices of the Akira Yamaguchi Chair, Spengler is collaborating with his longtime friend Professor Yukio Yanagisawa at the University of Tokyo. Together with Satoshi Nakai of Yokohama National University and Satoshi Isikawa of Kitasato University, Spengler and Yanagisawa are investigating neurotoxic effects of domestic use of pesticides, preservatives, and other organic compounds. Through these studies, combined with research on life cycle impacts of homebuilding in the United States and Japan, they seek to provide guidance to all homebuilders and architects to achieve a balance between energy efficiency and healthy homes.