A House Needs to Breathe...Or Does It?: An introduction to Building Science

By Allison A. Bailes III, PhD

Bright Communications © 2022

Review by Julia Bassett Schwerin

STEWART BRAND. Martin Holladay. Sam Rashkin. Peter Troast. Dan Kolbert. Joseph Lstiburek. Richard Corsi. Talk about a star-studded list of experts cited in this new book by a star author in his own right. Trying to get my bearings, I parsed the title. “A House Needs to Breathe” makes you think the book is about indoor air quality, which is partly correct. “… Or Does It?” makes you think this book is about dispelling myths, and you’d be partly correct. “An Introduction to Building Science.” Wait, what exactly is that, anyway?

Dr. Bailes begins with the seven “shears” for understanding the layers of a building and their relative rate of change: the stuff inside, the space plan, services, structure, the control layer, skin and site, ordered from most to least change over time in Stewart Brand’s epic book How Buildings Learn. A lot of space is devoted to various aspects of ensuring optimal indoor air quality, such as controlling moisture, air flow and heat in the building enclosure. Equally as much effort is devoted to HVAC and domestic hot water. Every chapter is illustrated and ends with a summary of the material. In surveying the gamut of topics covered in the very hefty volume, you might say building science is the study of a building’s systems performance relative to the health and comfort of the occupants and its affordability, durability and adaptability over time. The target audience is broad: residential building professionals (architects, engineers, home builders, trade contractors, real estate agents, home inspectors), owner-builders, do-it-yourselfers or motivated homeowners.

The extraordinary thing about Allison Bailes’ writing is the wide range of brackets within which his brain operates and his exuberant confidence that you, somewhere on that equally wide-ranging target-audience spectrum, can follow along. This, I believe, stems from his extraordinary career path, from college physics professor to home energy rater to builder to prolific building energy author on his Energy Vanguard blog.

Encyclopedic in breadth, authoritative in depth, practical in advice and examples, and entertaining in style, this volume has a lot to enlighten us with for a long time. There’s a great appendix that sets up and then slam dunks the question of heat pumps working in cold climates (they do if you choose the right one and a good contractor!) and then ends on a sad note for many of us wrestling with the reality of too little housing available for our populations: the view that disruption in the home building business is not coming anytime soon.

Bailes acknowledges: “This book is the culmination of my 20 years of learning building science.” I plan to save myself a lot of time and keep reading!

Learn more about building science and purchase the book on Dr. Bailes’ website, Energy Vanguard.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 edition of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES. Subscribe today!

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