Architecture (and Real Estate Development)

Architects have superpowers: the decisions they make in the months or years in which they design a building continue to act on the world we inhabit for generations. The buildings that they design can make our world feel dark and confined, or airy and expansive. They can isolate us, or draw us together in common spaces. They can keep us in contact with plants and other animals, or confine us in a world of only humans and human-made materials. And they can determine the impact we have on the climate as we go about our daily lives, by determining how much energy we need just to keep ourselves warm or cool.

In coming decades, as billions of people in the Global South are able to afford more adequate housing and as the world’s population grows, the world is expected to add an enormous number of new buildings – in floor space, the equivalent of an entire New York City, every single month, for forty years. About 17.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions right now come from energy we use to operate our existing buildings. We can retrofit these to reduce or eliminate their emissions; but depending on the building, retrofits can be expensive and disruptive – and the results are often less good than in a building that was designed and built to be low-carbon from the start. For the huge wave of new buildings that is coming, the world needs a new generation of architects, who will use their ingenuity and creative talents to break from the status quo and create buildings that are healthy, climate-positive, and climate-resilient by design.

Architects aren’t the only people we need in order to grow a climate-positive built environment. An architect may design a beautiful, climate-friendly building, only to find that the real estate developers and project investors who have hired them aren’t willing to pay the slightly higher up-front costs the building requires, even when those costs will be recouped in energy savings – or, that the developers simply aren’t interested in breaking from the status quo. The world needs developers and investors with vision, who will empower the architects they hire to design well for the planet. Even more, it needs developers who will fit climate-positive buildings together into walkable, climate-positive neighborhoods. (For the importance of dense, walkable neighborhoods as a climate solution, see our page on Urban Planning. For one example of a developer with vision building a walkable neighborhood, check out Culdesac, in Tempe, Arizona.)

Buildings and greenhouse gas emissions

As we saw in the page on buildings on the solutions side of the site, we can now heat and cool new buildings of any size, in any climate, with air-source or ground-source heat pumps. (Check out these examples of all-electric, heat pump-powered skyscrapers in New York City.) When the electricity that powers these heat pumps is renewable, operating these buildings need not generate any emissions. It can be tempting to conclude from this that efficiency, and building design more generally, does not matter – that there’s no problem building glass skyscrapers in the desert, so long as we use renewable energy to power their giant air conditioners. This is mistaken. The transition from a fossil fuel-based electricity system to a system of zero-carbon electricity will take decades. We are racing against climate change as we seek to deploy enough renewable energy supply to allow us to retire existing, fossil fuel-based generation, even as overall demand for electricity doubles or triples (because we are replacing gas cars with electric cars, gas furnaces with electric heat pumps, and so on). When we build a new building that uses more energy than it could use, we increase the total amount of renewable energy we need to build, and so delay the day that we are able to retire the last fossil fuel power plant. 

Building design matters for another reason as well: buildings are responsible not only for the greenhouse gas emissions required to operate them, but also for the emissions required to create them and the materials they’re built from. Producing materials like concrete and steel emits huge quantities of carbon dioxide. (See our pages on Industry and on Energy Use in Industry to understand why, and to see some possible solutions.) Still further emissions are involved in transporting these materials to a building site and then using heavy construction equipment to create a building. All of these emissions are “embodied” in the finished building. In a fossil fuel-powered building, these embodied emissions may account for a large fraction of the building’s total emissions over its lifetime. In an all-electric building powered by renewable energy, embodied emissions may account for almost all of a building’s emissions.

Using indigenous knowledge and designing for local climates

Forward-thinking architects around the world are now turning their ingenuity toward designing energy-efficient, low-embodied emissions buildings. Some of the wisest among them recognize that they do not need to start from scratch. Not too long ago, such buildings were the norm. Prior to the invention of the air-conditioner and the popularity of the international style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects used materials choices and design principles to condition the air in buildings passively. Materials and designs varied from place to place, reflecting local differences in climate, in available materials, and in local wisdom built up by indigenous communities over centuries.

If you were designing a home in New Mexico, for instance, you would use adobe bricks and thick walls that absorb the heat of the sun during the day and radiate it back slowly throughout the night. Window openings would be small, to keep direct sunlight from heating up the interior. Today we call this Pueblo-style architecture.

The same principles have even deeper roots in the Middle East, where natural shading devices such as palm frond screens and mashrabiya (ornate carved wooden screens) were used to limit internal heat gain.

Some buildings incorporated a barjeel – a wind tower that would catch cooler breezes and bring them down into the living spaces while circulating warmer interior air up and out to the exterior.

A barjeel in Dubai. Credit: Robert Ferry

Prior to the advent of air-conditioning, even modern, western architecture made use of techniques of passive heating and cooling appropriate to local climates. If you were designing a home in Louisiana, for instance, you would start with tall ceilings and large double window sashes that could be opened top and bottom to allow heat at the ceiling to waft out the open top sash. You would shade them with a covered veranda, or with working shutters, or both, so that the indoors did not get direct sunlight. And you would include a central hallway to create cooling breezes through the center or the living spaces. 

Much of this knowledge was set aside in the twentieth century. But the principles have endured in the work of architects like Hassan Fathy and can even be found in contemporary projects like Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, where narrow walkways between buildings called sikkas are shielded from direct sunlight, so that they remain cool.

In the United States, institutions like CalEarth are continuing the tradition of Adobe construction and adapting it to more modern techniques. For more examples of indigenous solutions to modern design challenges, check out these great books:

• Lo-Tek, by Julia Watson. (Also check out the resources on her website).
• Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Climate, edited by Sandra Piesik

Contemporary architects turn for inspiration not only to indigenous architectural traditions, but also to nature. After all, humans aren’t the only architects out there. For example, when the architect Mick Pearce designed the 1996 Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, he imitated the way in which the structure of termite mounds provides passive ventilation in warmer climates.

(The more general strategy of borrowing inspiration from nature to solve human problems – not only in architecture but in engineering and the design of other things – is called biomimicry. Check out the Biomimicry Institute for some amazing examples and resources.)

Indigenous and nature-based architectural solutions will need to differ not only from climate to climate, but even from building site to building site. This means that before a developer prepares a site and before an architect puts pen to paper, they need to perform a thorough analysis of the land, looking at the solar path throughout the seasons, cloud cover, wind patterns, and soil composition. They should perform a tree survey, hydrology study (are there wetlands? where does water flow above and below grade during an intense rainstorm?), and understand the natural ecology of the surroundings (who else already lives here?). By working with the natural energies that exist at a site, and by retaining the ecosystem services that already exist there, the architect will save the building owner time and money down the line and sometimes even up front. The decisions they make relating to the sun path and the site orientation during initial concept sketches may do much more good for the environmental impact of the building than decisions made later on such as what mechanical system to install.

To take one simple example, there is no better shading device than a mature deciduous tree. Trees have leaves that shade your house from the harsh summer sun, and in winter they allow sunlight through to passively heat interior spaces. Trees take decades to grow, so rather than clear-cut a site, a thoughtful architect will try to position the building in the best possible way to take advantage of existing trees, working in collaboration with the path of the sun across the seasons. 

Contemporary architects can take advantage not only of traditional low-embodied carbon materials like adobe or rammed earth; they can use a range of newer, engineered materials, some of which are actually carbon negative. One example: building materials engineered from bamboo.

Bamboo grows many times faster than trees: a single stalk can grow 20 meters in its first year, and once a stand of bamboo is mature (after 5-7 years), it can be harvested annually without replanting. As bamboo grows, it draws CO2 from the air and incorporates it into its biomass. When the bamboo is harvested and put into a building, that carbon is sequestered for as long as the building stands, while new bamboo grows in the place of what was harvested, pulling more carbon from the air.

Startups like Bamcore are trying to realize bamboo’s potential as a carbon-negative building material by manufacturing structural panels and mass-timber structural beams from bamboo that can be used in modern developments. The technology is promising because bamboo grows across much of the Global South, which is where a great deal of the new building in the twenty first century will happen.

Getting to regenerative

The possibility of carbon-negative building materials raises an exciting possibility: can we design buildings that are not just less bad for the climate than standard buildings, but that actually help? This is the idea of a regenerative building. At a minimum, such a building would not only meet its own water and energy requirements with on-site renewables and water-harvesting; it would generate enough energy and harvest enough water to help meet the needs of the city that surrounds it. It might compost organic waste and clean and reuse wastewater for use in indoor or rooftop gardens, as the Omega Center for Sustainable Living does. It might be built of materials that could be reused or recycled at the end of the building’s life, because they were chosen with the building’s full life-cycle in mind. And enough of those materials might be carbon-negative that the building as a whole would sequester at least as much carbon as was emitted in producing the building and the materials it is made from. 

Only a few buildings meet most of these criteria now; but they are beacons of a direction in which the next generation or architects can push, as they seek to create built environments that are compatible with thriving natural environments in a stable climate.

Architecture for Public Spaces

So far, we’ve been talking about the ways architects and real estate developers can build climate-positive residential and commercial buildings. But our shared, public spaces are just as important. These places can bring us together, foster civic engagement, and help us to imagine a sustainable and just future as a beautiful one that we want to inhabit. This is what the Land Art Generator Initiative aims to do. It holds competitions each year for public art that generates renewable power – and in doing so, shows those who use it what a renewable-powered world can be. At its website you can see many amazing designs, like the Arco Del Tiempo, below.

Some further resources

• Amanda Sturgeon, “Buildings Designed for Life,” in All We Can Save, pp. 166-169
• “Net Zero Buildings,” in Drawdown, pp. 84-85
• “Green Roofs,” in Drawdown, pp. 90-91
• “Living Buildings,” in Drawdown, pp. 188-189
• “Building with Wood” in Drawdown, pp. 210-211
• David Roberts, “The hottest new thing in sustainable buildings is, uh, wood”