Building codes and standards promise protection from many hazards—fire prevention, limiting the spread of disease, or even sufficient structural integrity. Codes define the design and materials that may be used for construction. In North America, they are (usually) developed by non-profit organizations with the consultation of interested and affected parties, which are then adopted in each relevant political territory by the pertinent legislative body. Standards ensure that materials, engineering systems, and construction techniques are uniformly produced, measured, and performed. A code can reference multiple product design and testing standards, but unless the standard is adopted and referenced by it specifically, it is strictly “advisory in nature” and cannot be legally enforced.¹

Historically, codes and standards reflect and enforce the dominant culture’s social values regarding the safety, health, and welfare of individuals, materialized in the built environment. In North America, fire protection measures were likely first imported by the British colonists, where codes had been developed in direct response to the Great London Fire of 1666.² Consequently, the first codes dealt primarily with fire safety by restricting flammable roof coverings like thatch, the use of wood chimneys, or height limitations of wood frame construction.³ After the Chicago Fire of 1871, building codes started to address the risks one building posed to adjacent buildings, leading to regulations about the construction of common walls between properties. In Canada, fire razed all the major cities before 1900, so municipalities here started to write and enforce building codes too, while adding sanitation measures to curb waves of urban disease.⁴

Unsurprisingly, disaster leads to increased safety measures. A memorable example, the structural failure that caused Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919, which killed twenty-one people and injured another 150, is the source of modern-day permits that require registered professionals to file and sign plans for major building work.⁵ However, the development of standards and codes was never simply about keeping the public safe using the most up-to-date science. “Rather, their formulation is a highly social and contentious process through which some interests are suppressed and others reinforced.”⁶ A parallel history reveals that the financial incentive of protecting private property, of more efficient colonization,⁷ and of standardizing manufacturing for industry gains⁸ was just as much a factor, if not more, in their development. In the late 1800s, fire protection engineering was invented and made popular by insurance companies looking to make a profit by limiting property loss through good fire protection practices. These practices were then widely adopted in cities because private insurance companies began to refuse coverage unless construction was “fire-resistant,”⁹ and offered lower rates for those that used fire prevention tools like automatic sprinklers or frequent inspection by qualified individuals. The first National Building Code in the US was created in 1905 by an insurance group protecting its interests. The same group then created Underwriters Laboratories (UL),¹⁰ which in the twentieth century became the major North American organization to provide product testing and safety certification services.¹¹ Building material manufacturers pay the non-profit UL to test and ensure products meet safety standards or codes to be able to enter the market, but since 2012 the money from these services has gone to its for-profit subsidiary UL LCC.¹²

To influence standards and codes, sometimes all it takes is good marketing.¹³ In the most extreme example, building codes and standards were so maliciously distorted by industry that the only thing they protected were profits, while knowingly harming millions in the process. In the 1960s, an increase in household fires due to cigarettes led to public concern and calls for fire-safe cigarettes. However, instead of investing in a search for alternatives, tobacco companies launched an aggressive campaign to shift the focus to the couches and chairs that were going up in flames, and spent millions to persuade firefighting organizations to adopt the same cause.¹⁴ In 1975, among a spike of deaths from house fires, frustrated California legislators—thwarted by efforts to enact any fire-safe requirements on cigarettes themselves—demanded increased fireproofing around the fire-catching culprits with a fire-test-response standard that would become notorious over the following decades.

The tobacco industry finally managed to force legislation that aligned with their interests, one that they falsely promoted as a way to save lives. California’s TB-117 standard requires upholstery foam to be able to withstand a small candle-like flame without catching fire, which furniture manufacturers met by adding chemicals to the foam in sofas and chairs.¹⁵ With the introduction of flame retardant chemicals (FRs) in furniture, the interests of chemical manufacturers and tobacco companies aligned: a convenient way to avoid accountability for one and a new market for the other.¹⁶

“The chemical industry has manipulated scientific findings…twisted research results, ignored findings that run counter to its aims and passed off biased, industry-funded reports as rigorous science…to promote the widespread use of flame retardants and downplay the health risks.”¹⁷ Health concerns linked to FRs emerged immediately, with scientists pointing out their chemical similarity to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which had been banned in 1977 for being toxic and carcinogenic.^{18 19} Research since has shown that FRs produce smoke and toxic gasses under combustion, and it is these byproducts that cause most fire-related deaths. Even unlit, the health costs of PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers)—one of the earliest FR chemicals—total more than USD 159 billion annually,²⁰ with flame retardants detected in the bodies of nearly all Americans. Beyond cancer—the predominant cause of fatalities among firefighters²¹—these chemicals are hormone disruptors linked to intellectual disabilities, hyperactivity in children, and decreased fertility. Despite evidence of harm, both industries participated in a “decades-long campaign of deception that has loaded…American homes with pounds of toxic chemicals.”²²

Our homes are meant to keep us safe, and we generally think the regulations that govern the products that we then put inside them are there to do just that. But whether well-intentioned or maliciously fraudulent, codes, standards, and tests sometimes do the opposite; they obfuscate the interests and values of these regulatory structures, hiding the impacts of common household materials on human and environmental safety behind bureaucratic compliance.

Flame retardants are just one such story of codes and chemicals in building materials perversely promoting harm while claiming to keep people safe. There are others. Vinyl chloride in PVC factories—more than 75% of which is for the building industry for materials like pipes, window frames, carpets, sealants, and paints—was poisoning workers for years before it was revealed that the industry was aware and had tried to cover it up.¹ Even today, a global construction conglomerate is being sued over its continued use of asbestos in cement pipes, exposing its workers to a carcinogenic chemical that even the ancient Greeks knew was toxic, and yet is not officially banned in the US.² Manufacturing plants of neoprene, used as a waterproofing agent in roof membranes,³ can be tied to environmental racism that led to Cancer Alley in Louisiana.⁴ Formaldehyde is linked to asthma and other respiratory problems, and it’s found in particle board, flooring, cabinets, most glues and adhesives, and even some insulation. We kind of just assume that if it’s in our homes, then someone along the line must have tested it to make sure it’s safe.

Rising awareness of chemical disasters in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US led to public concern about the risks of chemicals to human health and the environment, which led Congress to pass the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 1976. To appease the chemical industry’s pushback about the “unreasonable” costs of testing, the law grandfathered in sixty-two thousand unevaluated chemicals already in the market at the time. Criticized widely for its inability to do what it was created for, TSCA has only assessed about two hundred chemicals out of roughly eighty-five thousand in its inventory and managed to ban only five, including asbestos in 1989, overturned in 1991 by a court appeal. State legislature attempted to fill the policy void, with eighteen states enacting stricter chemical controls than the national law.⁵ Due to years of activism and pressure from the scientific community, consumers, and certain manufacturers, a revision of the law passed in 2017 now requires the EPA to reexamine the chemicals previously grandfathered into the old law.⁶ Criticism of the revision points out that there has been no increase in the EPA’s budget, curtailing their effectiveness in carrying out this additional mandate, and raises concerns that it will create difficulty for states trying to enact their own controls. Even the new revision caters to industry, making the EPA responsible for ensuring a chemical’s safety, unlike the EU’s REACH regulation passed in 2006, where the burden for safety rests on the industry, with manufacturers needing to conduct and submit test data for each new chemical.⁷

According to John Warner, who co-founded the green chemistry movement as an alternative approach to chemistry that centres human and planetary health, the harm from chemicals is not intentional on the part of companies but a strange byproduct of how the chemistry field of material science evolved. Warner suggests a more banal cause; chemists aren’t typically trained to evaluate risks to human health or nature. Every year there are fifteen thousand undergraduates, three thousand graduates, and three thousand PhDs in chemistry in the US, and yet very few academic programs offer curricula or courses to design safer commercial chemicals⁸ and none require chemists to take any formal training in toxicology.⁹ So, when they conduct basic research, turning molecules into materials, or applied research to turn materials into components, they assume that someone else down the line will deal with the questions of health and sustainability. But then components are turned into products (design and development), a lot of them are made (manufacturing), and then architects put them into buildings (specification). None of the professions involved in these stages have had any toxicology training either.

Some hope that more stringent chemical regulations, like the EU’s REACH will have a positive impact on North American industry too, but for a truly healthy outcome, regulations or incentives don’t seem like enough. Of the 90% of existing products needing improvement, only 20–25% can remove harm incrementally through research. Many scientists are looking at the field of green chemistry as a roadmap for the other 65–75% that still need to be invented to have a minimum impact on human health and the environment.¹⁰

Architects don’t invent products or materials, but they can have a role in improving public safety by understanding the impact of their material selections. Having personally gone through a professional degree program in the last decade that disproportionately valued form and design over “boring” topics—the material composition of buildings, where those materials come from, or how they affect human health or the environment—I sense a structural problem in architectural education.¹¹ Having sat through multiple universities’ graduate thesis reviews in the last few years, I fear that the situation doesn’t seem to have improved greatly, even if the underlying desire of current students, young professionals, or emerging academics has. Perhaps unwittingly, while our heads were turned towards what architectural prizes, magazines, and biennials told us was important in our field, buildings continued to be built, standards continued to be updated, and materials continued to be invented, tested, and specified without architects fully comprehending the agency they were giving up or not claiming. Today, when it comes to materials, practising architects most often just choose from a menu of bad options without being conscious of the impact or even aware that the menu needs dire improvement.

Vinyl floor covering, cheap and often specified in affordable housing units, is an example of the one of the options on the bad menu. It contains toxic phthalates which can cause learning and developmental disabilities in children at high levels of exposure. A glazed effect on exterior bricks, a recent trend, requires a second firing and a huge bump in the embodied carbon of this otherwise generally sustainable material. Products made from petrochemicals are the industry go-to for rigid foam insulation panels, water and drainage pipes, window frames, wall paints, and floor coatings, to name just a few. Air pollution in the areas around petrochemical production plants contributes to immediate and long-term effects like asthma, lung cancer, brain and organ damage, and cardiovascular diseases for the people who live or work nearby. Just like chemists, architects need to accept responsibility for our material selections instead of continuing to outsource it to manufacturers, relying on standard specification books that haven’t been updated in a decade, or contractors who don’t want to change some product they’ve always used. What is the green chemistry equivalent in architecture?

People who make buildings can feel trapped under the current conditions, as attempts to build differently are halted by practical and cultural obstacles: habit and risk aversion; standardization and warranties; costing and specification; financing and insurance; gaps in the supply of materials and lack of machinery or skilled workers. Making buildings differently starts by understanding what they are made of—how materials are extracted,¹ excavated,² manufactured,³ transported,⁴ specified,⁵ installed,⁶ removed,⁷ maintained,⁸ disposed of,⁹ or repurposed¹⁰—and the impacts of these processes on everything and everyone they come into contact with. This “allows us to engage in a slow, determined practice of reform, finding ways to adjust and reorientate existing infrastructures, economies, and technical knowledge to produce outcomes that start to demonstrate that different ways of creating and maintaining the built environment are not only necessary, but possible.”¹²

Beyond individual buildings, it is essential to recognize that the standards, norms, and codes that guide the safety of the built environment were written in direct response to specific conditions and reflect the values of their time. Andrew Freenberg proposes that the technical development of codes is a process through which societies modify their fundamental values, and their revisions redefine the cultural values within which economic activity, like construction, takes place.¹³ Can the redefinition of codes and standards to reflect our current societal values and environmental realities be a new field of action for designers and architects?

Over the last few years, protests in many Western countries have called for government action on climate change. Insulate Britain’s protests in 2021 and Renovate Switzerland’s similar demonstrations in April 2022 both called for national plans to insulate more homes. Higher thermal insulation would indeed reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from heating and cooling buildings, a position that is reflected in energy codes’ recent updates, requiring lower thermal transmittance or increased insulation thickness.² Yet, codes do not consider the harms of flame retardants that insulation needs to be fire-safety certified,³ the health risks for residents around the petrochemical plants to produce the additional insulation, or the increased energy and embodied carbon used to extract, manufacture, and transport it before it even reaches the building site.

Similarly, increasing health concerns about air quality in the context of the climate crisis have led to recent protests, like those in Québec by Mothers Step In.⁴ Last summer, Canadian wildfires made global headlines with the front pages of newspapers⁵ reminiscent of post-apocalyptic movie scenes, as air with hazardous levels of pollution affected millions, covering New York City and the entire eastern seaboard, extending into the Midwest as far as Indiana and into the South as far as North Carolina.⁶ Suddenly, air quality was the topic on everyone’s lips.

Yet every day, people live inside sealed buildings that use plastic, a cheap petroleum by-product, for materials like synthetic carpets, glues, pressed wood products, and vinyl, among others. The chemicals inside these products quietly and constantly emit toxic compounds from simple everyday activities: like friction from walking, abrasion from cleaning, or breakdown from the passing of time. Buildings held together with solvents, adhesives, particle board, and drywall release chemicals as airborne contaminants, polluting the quality of indoor air and endangering health. “In the early 1980s, the World Health Organization coined the term “sick building syndrome”⁷ to describe the constellation of symptoms caused by the invisible byproducts of modern construction.⁸

As of 2023, the EPA still doesn’t regulate indoor air in the US⁹ and there is no federal standard that sets performance benchmarks about indoor air quality.¹⁰ Without a holistic minimum for owners and builders to aim for or a way for inhabitants to know what is in the air they’re breathing, the burden of responsibility again falls to consumers, who are left with buying different sensors to detect carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, or particulate matter without actually understanding what it means for their health. No simple metric defines the safety of a building’s air in an easily comprehensible manner; no unambiguous and definitive reporting requirement exists to promote accountability.¹¹

Standards, norms, or codes that are meant to keep us safe are often driven by parallel interests or motivations that are in direct conflict with their projected primary function. These small or big hypocrisies should make us question compliance and norms. Cataloguing flame retardants, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and formaldehyde as well as where they are found in the home, the chemicals inside them, and their potential health effects questions safety assumptions about common household materials and reveals their damaging impacts on people all along the production, use, and elimination lifecycle: factory workers, installers, users, as well as communities around landfills or manufacturing plants.

We have to accept that our houses are slowly killing us. To imagine a radically different future for construction requires an understanding of the conditions that brought us to this version of normal and a recognition of who benefits from the systems and structures that created these regulations and keep them in place despite the harm they cause. Working towards a healthier industry can start with everyday changes within the scope of our current capacities, like learning about the harms of common building materials,¹² healthier alternatives,¹³ or which products are safe to specify.¹⁴ But bigger impacts require prioritizing collective efforts and reminding ourselves that “architects have 196 times more power to cut carbon through work than [personal] lifestyle.”¹⁵ Working in construction is to have the power to intervene, just maybe not in expected ways. If you don’t like the menu of bad options, expand it.