Description
Book SynopsisA detailed history of how sick building syndrome came into being: how indoor exposures to chemicals wafting from synthetic carpet, solvents, and so on became something that office workers felt and protested against
Trade Review“
Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty is all at once about the women’s health movement, ventilation, cybernetics, virology, and chemical toxicity. It is labor history and medical history wrapped into a fiercely disputed knot. Unraveling that tangle, and using the Syndrome to tell us about who we were at the turn of the millennium, Michelle Murphy has written a remarkable, insightful book.”—Peter Galison, author of
Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time“How does an illness come into being? In this provocative study, Michelle Murphy takes us on a journey into the making of an environmental illness, into the spaces of the modern office building, gendered labor practices, and workers’ bodies to reveal what is perceived and what is invisible in the built environment where many Americans spend their working days. How sick buildings and indoor air pollution became visible problems in environmental health is a story that takes us far beyond the architectural history of office buildings. It takes us deep into the architecture of reality: into how we know and what we know about environmental exposures and the uncertainties they pose both to knowledge and human health.”—Gregg Mitman, author of
The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Man in a Box: Building-Machines and the Science of Comfort 19
2. Building Ladies into the Office Machine 35
3. Feminism, Surveys, and Toxic Details 57
4. Indoor Pollution at the Encounter of Toxicology and Popular Epidemiology 81
5. Uncertainty, Race, and Activism at the EPA 111
6. Building Ecologies, Tobacco, and the Politics of Multiplicity 131
7. How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space 151
Epilogue 179
Bibliography 181
Notes 213
Index 241
