Architecture that designs for climate and resources: orienting and shading buildings to the sun, storing heat in mass, insulating and sealing the envelope, ventilating naturally and reducing the energy and carbon of construction and use.
Buildings shaped by climate are as old as building: the courtyard house, the wind-catcher, the deep eave, the thick adobe wall. What is new is the need to make every building efficient because of the energy it consumes: buildings account for roughly a third of the world’s final energy use and a large share of its carbon emissions. The oil crises of the 1970s turned passive solar design from an experiment into a movement; the climate crisis has made it the main agenda of contemporary architecture.
Its method was systematised by Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate (1963): orient the building toward the equator, shade the glass in the overheated season and admit the sun in the cold one, choose compact or open forms according to the climate. A simple rule follows from solar geometry: an overhang deep enough to shade a window from the high summer sun lets the low winter sun pass beneath it. Heavy materials inside the insulated envelope store that winter sun and even out the temperature.
Since 1990 the German Passivhaus standard has shown how far the envelope alone can go: very thick insulation without thermal bridges, triple glazing, airtightness and heat-recovery ventilation reduce heating demand to about a tenth of a conventional building’s. Other strands pursue natural ventilation (Mick Pearce’s Eastgate Centre in Harare, modelled on the termite mound), renewable energy on site, planting (Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale in Milan), low-carbon materials such as timber and earth, and the reuse of existing buildings, which avoids the carbon of demolition and new construction.
Sustainable architecture is less a style than a set of performance goals; it can look like a vernacular farmhouse, a high-tech tower or a timber-framed block of flats. Its common rule is that the form of a building should answer to its sun, wind and site, a return, with new tools and measurements, to one of the oldest principles of architecture.