Building Science Hall of Fame
Those who have had a profound and lasting influence on the field now known as Building Science either by invention, promotion, direction, education, or practice.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollione
+/- 75 BC – 10 BC Roman Republic
Wrote the original building science book, De Architectura.
Many contributions to the building and design industry related to site planning, water distribution, enclosure assemblies, indoor air quality, material durability, constructability, daylighting, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius
Fillipo Brunelleschi (aka Pippo)
1377 – 1446 Florence, Republic of Florence.
The first modern engineer, planner, and construction supervisor. Revered for his ability to develope complex architecture that was beautiful, functional, durable, and constructable. Famous for engineering and building the first ever back drained and ventilated dome roof over the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence (1420 – 1461), which has never had a significant leak. His work directly influenced Michelangelo, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, and others. His back drained and ventilated, double-shell dome design was copied in many other famous domes: St. Peter’s Basilica, The U.S. Capital, the Dôme des Invalides, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Brunelleschi
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790 Boston, MA and Philadelphia, PA
North America’s original building scientist: Founder of the Junto and the Library Company of Philadelphia; Inventor of the Franklin Stove – which improved heating efficiency and reduced smoke in homes and buildings – the lightning rod, and various building ventilation and heating concepts; He was a champion of open knowledge sharing and his work on convection, airflow management, and efficient heat transfer remains central to modern HVAC systems. Also had some involvement with the founding of the United States of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
Alexander Cumming
1731 – 1814 Edinburgh, Scotland.
A watchmaker and organ builder who patented the first flush toilet design that didn’t stink. His 1775 invention added an S-trap to earlier, stinky designs. And that’s the same design still used today in most toilets. His work was a monumentally important contribution to improved indoor air quality in all buildings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Cumming
Benjamin Thompson (AKA Count Rumford)
1753 – 1814 Woburn, MA
A despicable loyalist who abandoned his wife to save himself and then form the King’s American Dragoons before fleeing to Europe. Despite those wrong-headed life choices, Thompson developed improved fireplace and chimney designs that maximized radiant heat output, reduced draft volume, reduced wood fuel consumption, and reduced smoke blow back – all significant features of building heating systems before central heating was developed. His designs were widely used from the late 1700’s through the late 1800’s and are still common today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Thompson
Joseph Aspdin
1778 – 1855 Leeds, England
A bricklayer who created and manufactured the first “modern” Portland cement – the cornerstone of the modern building industry, serving as the primary binding agent in concrete, mortar, stucco, and grout. Concrete is the most manufactured material on Earth. His invention revolutionized construction, enabling the shift from load-bearing walls to skeletal frameworks, accelerating urbanization, and supporting large-scale infrastructure development worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Aspdin
Angier March Perkins
1799 – 1881 Old Newburyport, Massachusetts.
A printer who started a heating and steam engineering business. By 1831 he had developed a method of warming buildings using hot water circulating through small, closed pipes – a foundational technology for modern central heating. He invented modern hydronic heating. His first system was installed at the home of the Governor of the Bank of England for the purpose of grape cultivation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angier_March_Perkins
Henry Flagg French
1813 – 1885 Chester, New Hampshire
An accomplished attorney who studied the best drainage engineering practices from around the world, combined those with climatological data from New England and wrote the first, and most comprehensive book about farm drainage, and drainage in general. It is the foundational document about control of ground water. The ‘French drain’ comes by its name because of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_F._French
Florence Nightingale
1820 – 1910
Born in Florence, Tuscany, to British parents, Nightingale was an English statistician and founder of modern nursing. Although untrained as a nurse, architect, or engineer she served in the Crimean War caring for wounded British soldiers and in that capacity developed ideas and practices that have landed her in this Hall of Fame.
During that war service she conceived of and implemented practices that we would now call building science applied to health: ventilation, daylighting, sanitation, and noise control. She also developed extraordinary epidemiology practices that should place her in the International Statisticians Hall of Fame: “To understand God’s thoughts, one must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.” Her development and use of graphical statistical visualization as a persuasive decision-making tool in public policy and health was genuinely groundbreaking. If you ever use the Chart function in Excel, you should think of her.
Nightingale observed that more soldiers were dying from disease than from battle wounds. She systematically linked this to hospital environmental conditions, especially:
- poor ventilation,
- overcrowding,
- contaminated water,
- and inadequate sanitation.
Although not the first to notice that buildings effect health, she was the first to rigorously reframe buildings as controllable environmental systems whose design can directly determine health outcomes at scale. She treated “bad air” as a design flaw rather than just a medical issue.
That idea is pure building science thinking.
On top of this, she wrote a lot, and her writing style was clear, direct, evidence-heavy, analytical, instructional, not flowery, and written in engaging, plain, common language. A style later adopted by other Hall of Fame inductees, including Robert Ferguson Legget, Neil Barron Hutcheon, Gus Handegord, and Joe Lstiburek. She was a critical link in the long line of authors of canonical building science documents, from Vitruvius to Lstiburek, who successfully brought complex but important, relevant information to practitioners with a style that promoted interest and understanding.
And she was a shit kicker: “I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.”
Augustine Sackett
1841-1914 Warren, Connecticut.
A Navy veteran of the Civil War who invented and manufactured wallboard. His product replaced wet-applied plaster on wood or metal lath which improved construction schedules and reduced costs. Originally called Sackett Board, drywall is now the most common interior wall sheathing in both residential and commercial construction.
https://www.invent.org/inductees/augustine-sackett
Rafael Guastavino Moreno
1842 – 1908 Valencia, Spain.
A building engineer and builder who promoted, designed, and built load-bearing, thin-tile, long-span, fireproof arch and dome constructions which reduced building loads and improved fire safety. He designed and built many beautiful, functional, durable, and fire-safe buildings including the Boston Public Library, the Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant, the Ellis Island Great Hall, the Nebraska State Capitol, Carnegie Hall, The Biltmore Estate, the Bridge Market under the Queensboro Bridge, the interior dome of the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville, NC, and many, many more.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Guastavino_Moreno
Richard Mollier
1863 – 1935 Trieste, Germany.
A professor of applied Physics and Mechanics who pioneered significant experimental research in thermodynamics, particularly for water, steam, and moist air. He developed enthalpy-entropy charts – now known as Mollier diagrams – that are routinely used to visualize the working cycles of thermodynamic systems in air conditioning equipment, refrigeration systems, steam turbines, power plants, and the like. These charts are psychrometric charts in a different form (rotate it 90o and look at it in a mirror). Mollier invented the psychrometric chart, an exceptionally useful tool for building scientists.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mollier
Henry Reynolds
Grand Rapids, MI
A roofing contractor who invented asphalt shingle roofing by cutting asphalt-saturated rolls into individual pieces in 1903. This development enabled easier installation and improved adaptability to steep-sloped residential roofs. This is the most significant advance in the history of the roofing industry. Approximately 80% of all residential roofs in the United States are now clad with asphalt shingles.
Willis Haviland Carrier
1876 – 1950 Angola, New York
An engineer who invented electric powered air conditioning, flipped the Mollier diagram and popularized its use in its modern format – the psychrometric chart – and wrote the “Magna Carta” of psychrometrics: Rational Psychrometric Formulae. This document brought together concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, making the design of fit-for-purpose air-conditioning systems possible. This technology was originally developed for industrial processes but has since been refined for use in all building types and, as of 2026, is installed in approximately 90% of all buildings in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carrier
Charles Haven
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
A refrigeration engineer who patented an improved dual-pane insulated glass unit in 1934 that was ultimately produced by the Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Company under the trade name Thermopane. These units were further developed over many years, and such technology is now used in approximately 66% of all windows in the United States. These units have reduced the energy use in buildings where installed and estimates as high as $150 billion have been calculated for the value of those savings.
https://engineerfix.com/when-did-double-pane-windows-become-standard/
Robert Ferguson Legget
September 29, 1904 – April 17, 1994
A British-born Canadian civil engineer, geotechnical pioneer, and prolific author who is best known in the building field as the founding Director of the National Research Council Canada’s Division of Building Research.
Born in Liverpool to Scottish parents, Legget earned his B.Eng. in Civil Engineering and Geology from the University of Liverpool (1925) and an M.Eng. in 1927. He began his career on the Lochaber hydroelectric project in Scotland, then emigrated to Canada in 1929, working in construction in Montreal before transitioning to academia at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto. He published his influential first book, Geology and Engineering, in 1939 – a foundational text for geotechnical engineering in Canada.
In 1947, Legget was invited by the National Research Council Canada to establish and lead the new Division of Building Research, a post he held until his retirement in 1969 (succeeded by Neil Hutcheon). Under his direction, the DBR became the central research and information service for the Canadian construction industry. Two of his most consequential contributions were driving the revision of the original 1941 National Building Code into a nationally respected and consistent model code and providing technical support to the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation during the post-war housing boom.
In 1965 he became president of the Geological Society of America, and at the same time was president of the American Society for Testing and Materials. From 1966 to 1969 he was also president of the International Council for Building Research, Studies, and Documentation. Later he was appointed to the Order of Canada (OC), elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and received thirteen honorary doctorates. After retirement he wrote extensively on the history of Canadian canals and transportation.
In 1960, as Director of the Division of Building Research, he launched the Canadian Building Digest series. Those documents were a direct product of his conviction that building knowledge developed at the Division needed to reach practitioners in the field — he famously acknowledged the DBR’s failure to communicate with the industry and championed the Canadian Building Digest series as the remedy.
The CBDs effectively codified and popularized building science as a discipline in Canada and, by extension, across North America. Before the series launched, the principles governing moisture movement, vapor diffusion, condensation, rain penetration, and thermal performance were largely confined to academic papers inaccessible to practitioners. The CBDs translated that science into plain language that architects, builders, and engineers could act on. Issues such as those covering the rain screen principle, vapor barriers, and the behavior of masonry under freeze-thaw cycles became canonical references that shaped how an entire generation of buildings were designed.
Ultimately, two hundred and fifty CBDs were published between 1960 and 1990. A handful of the most-referenced issues — particularly those on vapor diffusion, condensation, rain penetration, and moisture management — are among the most widely cited building science documents in Canadian and North American technical literature. Unfortunately, they all contain misspellings of several common words, like vapor (vapour), fiber (fibre), and analyze (analyse), and also used very odd words for some very common building parts, like eavestrough (gutter), tap (faucet), hydro (electricity), zed-section (z-section), and first floor (second floor), eh.
To quote Dr. Lorne Gold, senior NRC researcher, and author of the quintessential book on how to build an aircraft hangar using only reinforced ice:
“Few people make an impact on their profession and personal relationships as deep and lasting as that of Robert Ferguson Legget. He was an outstanding practitioner and teacher of engineering, a dedicated servant of the public, and an enthusiastic author and historian.”
Neil Barron Hutcheon, B.E., M.Sc., Ph.D.
+/- 1910 – 1990
Born at the intersection of Highway 4 and Highway 7, one hundred and fifty miles Northwest of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Dr. Hutcheon went on to devote his life to the science and philosophy of building construction. Ultimately, he became one of the most consequential building scientists Canada has ever produced and an international authority on the subject.
After earning his Ph.D. at the University of London (UK) he joined the University of Saskatchewan’s Faculty of Engineering in 1937. There he developed a research program on heat and moisture problems in buildings. In 1953 he relocated to Ottawa and became the Assistant Director of the Division of Building Research, National Research Council Canada where he remained for 24 years – the last five as Director.
Hutcheon is credited with a foundational conceptual contribution to building science: in 1953, during a lecture to the Engineering Institute of Canada, he first articulated the concept of the building envelope as an environmental separator — identifying the principal functional requirements of the enclosure (control of airflow, moisture, energy, and sound) as discrete problems to be addressed systematically. This framework underpins virtually all modern building enclosure design theory, including the screened wall/rain screen/pressure equalized rain penetration control scheme.
During his time at the Division of Building Research he solo-authored five Canadian Building Digests – including CBD-1 Humidity in Canadian Buildings (1960), CBD-48 Requirements for Exterior Walls (1963), and CBD-50 Principles Applied to an Insulated Masonry Wall (1964). He also co-authored an additional four CBDs.
In 1983 he co-authored the landmark textbook Building Science for a Cold Climate with Gus Handegord, which remains a standard reference.
Hutcheon was a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, a Fellow of ASHRAE, and received ASHRAE’s Distinguished Service (1967) and its F. Paul Anderson Award (1975) — the latter being ASHRAE’s highest recognition for notable scientific achievement.
To paraphrase Dr. Joe Lstiburek: “ Hutcheon was some real smart guy. His brainchild really was ‘perfect’.”
