A pioneer in healthy buildings, Raefer Wallis has taken his experience in China onto a much more global stage
When Raefer Wallis graduated from university nearly two decades ago, Quebec was hardly the best place on Earth for a new architect. In the grip of a recession, things were slow.On Jan. 3, 2002, he landed in Shanghai, a city in the grip of the construction burst that fashioned the concrete-and-glass underpinnings of China’s emergence as a rising superpower, with its cities erecting some of the planet’s most audacious buildings.But Mr.
Modern urbanites spend roughly 90 per cent of their time indoors, and the air-quality fears stoked by outdoor smog – through the circulation of photos of “airpocalypse” events in China, but also the rise of pollution warnings in major Western cities such as Paris, London and Toronto – have also begun to raise consciousness about what people inhale indoors.
His company, GIGA, is a “humble, brilliant organization,” whose modest size belies global influence, said Lisa Bate, the global sustainability lead with B+H Architects who chairs the World Green Building Council. “Typical Canadians – punching way above their weight.”“What we’re tackling,” Mr. Wallis said, “is essentially figuring out the health profile of buildings. That sounds somewhat unsexy – but it’s just understanding how healthy or unhealthy are buildings for us.
Even as the data began to accumulate, however, Mr. Wallis wanted to know how to measure the ways all those better materials actually came together in a building, to “track and see if it’s working.”The Reset device shows the quality of the air inside One World Palace, in Shanghai, China.
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