Striking a Balance: Sustainable Design is the Sum of its Parts

Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its starkest warning yet. If we, on a global scale, do not do more to combat the climate crisis, we “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

At UNStudio, we have always sought to future-proof the future; to create designs that are both adaptive and resilient in order to craft a healthier built environment. This is where sustainability plays an instrumental role in how we design.

To ensure we don’t waste materials or make investments that are no longer sustainable or appropriate in today’s world, we are continuously developing strategies that not only anticipate the future, but possible changes to that future as well.

This is where our Sustainability Engineering Group comes into play. Headed by Marc Hoppermann, who was the first architect in the Netherlands to be awarded the WELL building certificate, our sustainability group takes an entirely holistic approach to designing not only sustainable projects, but ones that contribute to the overall health of users while retaining aesthetic qualities.

We have decided to call this new practice “sustainability engineering” to illustrate our methodology, which bridges an engineering and an analytical approach with parametric design. We believe that intertwining developments in sustainability - such as the renewed focus on materiality, especially in wood, green heating and cooling systems, water management, biophilic design - with our skills as architects, is the only way forward.

With this focus, we maintain our commitment to health. We have a keen understanding that in order to design a more sustainable, technologically innovative and equitable society, we must take into consideration the physical, mental and social health of users.

With densification as one of the most urgent challenges currently facing cities all over the world, and current predictions stating that by 2050 an additional 2.5 billion people will be living in urban areas, we have to re-think space.

Let’s look at an example; take a high-rise building: you have a limited amount of roof space to accommodate energy harvesting technologies, while also utilising the space for food production, or for creating social spaces for the building’s users. Then we must ask ourselves: how best can that space be utilised? Here, architects can look instead to the facade as a surface to integrate PV technologies; we can introduce biophilic design components such as vertical farming techniques to produce food while also bringing nature closer to residents, and then we may make way for recreational areas, which have a positive impact on the overall health of users and enable community.

We also see all of this as an opportunity to combine programmes, either within the building or within cities, to make smaller energy networks.

This sort of symbiosis must also be taken into consideration when discussing materiality. In the past, we looked at what is in the material, what is it being used for, can we recycle it? Now, our approach also takes into account embedded carbon and the importance of Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies. Recently much attention has been paid to the use of wood in buildings. Timber has many advantages; it is a renewable product, it stores CO2 for its entire life cycle, it is lighter and easier to transport. However, an LCA allows us to consider many facets of a project and its programme to limit material usage to an absolute minimum.

In addition, integral to LCA is designing for demolition. How can you assemble the building so that it can be dismantled later in such a way that its materials can be re-used? Now, we look at a building as the sum of its layers, and while the goal is to create structures that will last for years to come, we also have to look at extending the use of these layers beyond that original life span.

As part of the IPCC report, Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said “climate change in the 21st century threatens … smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation.”

We as architects have the tools at our disposal to help mitigate these potential tragedies. With a collective effort to not only design a sustainable built environment, but also one that supports human health on all levels, we have the capabilities to play our part in combatting the climate catastrophe. But it requires a collective effort on the part of designers, clients, consultants, contractors, users and governments to take these steps and forge a greener, more resilient and healthy future. 

You can read our full Sustainability report, here.