Building Science Hall of Fame
Those who have had a profound and lasting influence on building science through invention, promotion, education, or practice, known or unknown, credentialed or not.
The Unknown Builder
300,000 B.C. –
Science is the rigorous process by which we try to explain and quantify nature. It is our attempt at uncovering the rules by which the physical world functions. Engineering is applied knowledge, or at least a good guess, put to work for some human purpose. Sometimes that knowledge comes from a scientific process, but often not. Building science is where those things meet, with buildings as the focus.
Rarely do science or engineering come before practice. Humans almost always do before they understand. We are doers first, engineers second, scientists third. Those doers should be appreciated. They led the way. They were the originators.
It is tempting to believe that good building practices today are mostly the product of smart, thorough research and development. In truth, they are largely the accumulated knowledge of previous doers, not researchers. People had real problems to solve – block the wind, keep the rain out, stay warm, stay alive – not differential equations. We were building bridges long before we had the mathematics to calculate shear load failure. The science, understanding, and engineering came later. Often much, much later. The same is true for building science.
Back-drained and ventilated claddings were not invented in Building M‑20 at the Montreal Road Laboratories in Ottawa. That is merely where their nature was studied and explained. Unknown, long-forgotten builders in Japan, Scandinavia, Alpine Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere created structures that, for all practical purposes, incorporated some of our best modern “building science” practices.
The same is true for many transformative building technologies. The arch was not invented in a lab by a structural engineer with a Ph.D. from Rensselaer; it was invented by some unknown mason thousands of years ago who needed to solve the problem in front of him. Ancient stone masonry in Peru has not survived because of fancy computer modeling; its durability is the result of necessity plus trial and error. Roman hydraulic cement was not formulated in a NASA facility; it was mixed on the side of a volcano by people who needed to get something built in an era when “pizza” was not even a word. Suspension bridges were built so long ago that the terms “stress” and “strain” only referred to feelings about saber-toothed tiger attacks, not engineering material properties.
Right now, something is being built by someone who neither knows nor cares which scientific principles are involved. That is what humans do. Science follows behind those Hall of Famers; their legacy remains. We still build in many of the same ways, but as individuals, they have been lost to time. We do not know who they were, but they deserve our respect and gratitude. They are the bedrock of this Hall of Fame. Upon their legacy, all later building science was built.
Hippocrates
c.460 BC – c.370 BC, Kos, Greece
Hippocrates was an ancient Greek physician commonly referred to as “The Father of Medicine.” He should be referred to as “The Father of Short, Practical Articles.”
The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of treatises, most on medicine. Sort of like the Canadian Building Digests but much older, written in Greek, and on medicine. Many were short, pithy documents written for the purpose of passing on useful knowledge to practitioners, with all the political correctness expected of something written 2,400 years ago. The most famous is The Hippocratic Oath, which does not say “first, do no harm.” That wasn’t anywhere. It’s a famous mistranslation of a sentence in one of his other treatises titled Epidemics.
Imagine that. 2,400 years ago. Epidemics. ‘First, do no harm.’
One of his treatises is titled On Airs, Waters, and Places. In it he urged physicians and civic leaders to consider seasonal climate, settlement orientation, humidity, prevailing winds, water sources, local geography, and the like when evaluating individual and public health. Where you put your building matters, can be the difference between health and sickness, and must be considered when diagnosing illness.
In doing this, Hippocrates helped initiate a revolutionary idea: buildings and cities are not passive shelters; the built environment is a key determinant of physical, mental, and social well-being. That’s building science thinking and those foundational insights anticipated later developments in sanitation engineering, indoor air quality, hospital design, and urban planning.
The intellectual lineage, starting with his insights, extends through Roman environmental design traditions, Renaissance civic planning, 19th-century sanitary reformers such as Florence Nightingale, and ultimately into modern building science.
Of equal importance, Hippocrates understood something that many experts still forget today: knowledge acquired only matters if it is shared. He wrote his ideas down, and his words were clear, practical, and in a style meant to be understood, not hidden behind status or ceremony. Rather than guarding what he had learned, he gave it away freely so others could build upon it, improve lives, and avoid repeating old mistakes. His writings were not acts of self-promotion. They were acts of public service that helped establish a tradition that meaningful progress comes not from hoarding knowledge, but from passing it forward. His work furthered the idea that knowledge should belong to everyone.
Though he lived centuries before formal architecture or engineering disciplines existed, Hippocrates helped establish one of building science’s core principles: the quality of the built environment affects the quality of human life. By sharing his work in writing, he preserved those ideas for generations to come.
Aristotle
384 BC – 322 BC. Stagira, Kingdom of Macedon.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and teacher. He was also one of the original gangsters of rational thought.
Long before research laboratories, engineering schools, or scientific journals, Aristotle argued that myth, mystery, and the moods of the gods were over-rated. He believed the natural world behaved according to discoverable principles and that human beings could learn something useful about reality through observation, classification, logic, and plain old curiosity.
And, like Babe Ruth, he was both the Home Run King and the Strike Out King: he got a lot right, and he got a lot wrong. Sometimes spectacularly wrong. Heavy things don’t fall faster because they are heavy. Spontaneous generation is not real. The heavens are not perfect crystalline spheres. And history offers little evidence that education, wealth, and status alone produce wiser rulers or more virtuous judgment.
But that sort of scorekeeping misses the larger point: He helped move human thought away from pure mythology and toward the idea that natural phenomena might have understandable causes rooted in the physical world itself. Instead of explaining every strange thing as the whim of a god or spirit, he attempted to organize knowledge into systems that could be observed, discussed, compared, and reasoned through.
Much of modern science traces part of its intellectual lineage back to that basic idea: the world can be studied, understood, questioned, tested, and improved through disciplined inquiry.
That intellectual tradition eventually became foundational to engineering, architecture, physics, medicine, and building science.
Every building scientist who has ever tried to understand why a wall gets wet, why condensation forms inside a roof assembly, or why one building quietly survives while another rots from the inside out is participating in that same intellectual tradition: observe carefully, question assumptions, organize information, and search for physical causes rather than convenient stories.
In that sense, Aristotle helped establish one of the foundational ideas underlying modern building science: the built environment is not magic. Buildings obey the laws of nature whether architects, contractors, developers, or owners understand those laws or not. The physical world has order. Causes led to effects. Climate, heat, moisture, motion, and material behavior can be observed, categorized, discussed, and, at least partially, understood.
That sounds obvious to us today because thousands of years of thinkers, scientists, builders, engineers, and tinkerers slowly pushed civilization in that direction. But it was not obvious then.
Buildings are governed by physical laws, not wishful thinking. That is Aristotle’s legacy.
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’.”
