The argument I am introducing here stems from my initial inquiry into the relationship between architecture and the concept of environmental sustainability—an issue I began working on in the latter part of the first decade of the new century. The first draft of this document dates back to late 2012, conceived as the architectural continuation of a broader inquiry into the historical developments that shaped ecological thinking and environmentalism, as outlined in my earlier article The Place of Sustainability.
With this work, my intention was to propose a conceptual framework—both accessible and implementable—that could reveal the fundamental connections between architecture and ecology on theoretical and practical levels alike. This framework guided my first architectural and urban project explicitly based on ecological principles, the Badel Block Redevelopment project in Zagreb, Croatia. Both the framework and that project strongly influenced my subsequent theoretical turn toward the concept of place—and the related reconsideration of the meanings of place and space.
For me, the structure of place is systemic in nature, grounded in ecological principles, and further characterized by processual, relational, evolutionary, and choral dimensions (see the article What Is Place? What Is Space?).[1] In future articles, I plan to examine more closely the ecological working principles of reality and the cosmos—understood as complex systems—and how these principles shape the reformed concepts of place and space that I am proposing. In doing so, I will complete the first cycle of articles—initiated with the presentation of the paper From Space to Place, A Necessary Paradigm shift in Architecture—that traces the reasoning behind my shift from space to place and the need to rethink both concepts.
What follows is the original text I wrote in 2012, with only minor revisions for this release. (By clicking the links in the captions beneath each image, you can download high-quality vector versions.)
1. Introduction
The traditional competences and theoretical knowledge of architects are no longer sufficient to address the paradigm shift that design disciplines (architecture, urban planning, landscape design, industrial design, etc.) are currently facing. Environmental challenges are now so deeply interwoven with the profession, and so difficult to overcome, that a fundamental knowledge of ecological principles has become indispensable for anyone engaged in design.
In the near future, professional designers will require a widespread understanding of the key concepts of ecology and its systemic operating principles. Without such knowledge—and without undertaking structural changes—the traditional role of architects and architectural firms risks being diminished, as new professional figures emerge to fill this gap. We are already witnessing the beginnings of these transformations.
What, then, are the frontiers of ecological thinking for architects? What new expertise and competencies are required to develop an integrated approach capable of engaging with the complex processes of reality—physicochemical, biological, socio-cultural, and symbolic—from the very earliest stages of design? This study proposes and analyzes a basic, easily applicable conceptual framework for developing an ecological approach to design practices, with a particular focus on architecture. Such a framework can complement the bottom-up strategies commonly adopted by architects today through environmental monitoring systems that assess a building’s impact using benchmarks, indicators, indexes, and quantitative ratings.
2. Definition and Premises
Architecture and ecology share a close figurative kinship. Architecture traditionally addresses the ‘house of man,’ while ecology—derived from the Greek οἶκος (oikos, house, household) and λόγος (logos, word, discourse, study)—[2] concerns the ‘house of all living beings.’ Why, then, is it so urgent for architecture to enter into a meaningful dialogue with ecology?
From its beginnings, architecture has been situated between culture and nature. Early humans built the first “A”-shaped shelters to protect themselves from natural forces, and from that moment onward, culture—and architecture as one of its manifestations—gradually diverged from nature. For millennia, the balance between humans and their environment was not a central concern. Only in the past two centuries has the impact of human activities grown so immense that it has prompted the proposal of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.[3]
Today, architects must broaden their responsibilities. Their projects should not only address human needs and environments, but also consider the wider consequences of architectural activity on the natural world. Why is this so critical? Because the scale and speed of natural resource consumption are no longer sustainable for human well-being. Since our survival depends entirely on Earth’s ecosystems and the services they provide—food, water, climate regulation, biodiversity, and more—design can no longer focus solely on the human built environment. It must also account for, and actively safeguard, the ecosystems and services that make life possible.
here for high quality image).
here for high quality image).3. Environmental Sustainability
Environmental sustainability—defined as ‘the unimpaired maintenance of human life-supporting systems’,[4]—is a central goal for all future development and for every human project. For professionals engaged in activities that shape and transform the territory—architects, urban planners, engineers, policymakers, and stakeholders alike—a global perspective is indispensable, even when working at the local scale. Every action may generate multiple side effects, both immediate and distant, geographically and temporally.
Sustainability transcends fixed boundaries—geographic, political, and economic—requiring new competencies to address an entirely new condition. Moreover, environmental sustainability is inseparable from social and economic sustainability, as the former is a prerequisite for the latter.[5] Since economies depend heavily on the exploitation of natural resources, their impacts on the environment—as both source and sink—are inevitable. Complicating this further, many critical resources are located in underdeveloped or rapidly developing regions, where pressing needs for growth often outweigh environmental priorities. In this light, the urgent need for a global natural and social contract becomes clear—one capable of addressing environmental challenges while advancing higher standards of social, economic, and ecological well-being.
4. Ecosystem Services
What exactly must be sustained to preserve or improve human well-being? The answer is ecosystem services.
Human security (safety, disaster resilience, access to resources), the material foundations of a good life (adequate livelihoods, nutrition, and goods), health (clean air, water, and vitality), social relations (cohesion, mutual respect, solidarity), and freedom of choice and action—all are inseparably linked to the supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services provided by ecosystems.
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), the degradation of ecosystem services caused by human activity has accelerated dramatically over the past 50 years. Without timely action, these damages may worsen significantly, with some becoming irreversible.[6] Essential services such as food, water, fuel, medicines, climate regulation, air and water purification, erosion control, soil formation, nutrient and water cycling, and primary production all sustain life on Earth and underpin biodiversity.
5. Ecosystem Services and Architecture
It is crucial to recognize that knowledge about ecosystem services and their functions constitutes a shared corpus of reference that must inform responses to environmental challenges, regardless of profession or discipline. Because ecosystem services are directly tied to human well-being, they provide a comprehensive, global perspective on sustainability. For design-related disciplines in particular, the study of ecosystem services should be a foundational starting point.
One practical way forward would be to establish diagrams that map correspondences between specific ecosystem services and different design disciplines. In architecture, for example, connections with erosion control or the water cycle are relatively straightforward and should be addressed from the earliest stages of the design process. But what about less obvious links—such as those between architecture and food production, or architecture and pollination? These questions, illustrated in Image 3 (below), highlight the broader and often unexpected intersections between ecosystem services and the built environment.
here high quality image).In recent decades, several tools and evaluation methods for the building sector—such as LEED, BREEAM, and CASBEE and many more—have been introduced to assess the environmental sustainability of architecture. While some of these instruments are relatively efficient, architects risk applying them in a reductive, bottom-up manner, thereby missing the broader vision and meaning of sustainability. By contrast, adopting a matrix or chart that directly links architecture with ecosystem services represents an inversion of method: a top-down approach that requires a comprehensive understanding of the ecological relationships between the human and natural environment. If genuine innovation in sustainable architecture is to emerge, it will likely arise from the fruitful intersection of seemingly distinct disciplines—particularly the encounter between architecture and ecology (see Image 4, lower right).
6. Sustainability and Architecture: A Threefold Strategy
The comparison between architecture and ecosystem services introduces the field of sustainability as applied to design and construction processes. But what is sustainable architecture? Can the broad concept of environmental sustainability be directly transferred to the architectural realm? I argue that it must: architecture must address environmental, economic, and socio-cultural issues across its entire life cycle.
Specific indicators and tools for construction have been developed primarily for the environmental domain, while quantitative measures for the economic dimension—such as costs of construction, embodied energy, energy consumption, maintenance, and disposal—are also well established. By contrast, there is relatively little literature and few practical tools addressing the social dimension of sustainability in architecture. This imbalance reflects the trajectory of the past two decades: environmental issues were the first to be systematically studied, followed by economic concerns, while social sustainability has been treated as a secondary outcome. This area deserves much deeper investigation by architects and planners.[7]
In relation to architecture and environmental sustainability, three principal approaches can be identified, which span from technologically-oriented considerations to a more holistic and ecological vision, which is desirable:
- Energy-saving approach – Focuses on technological solutions and the form factor of a building to achieve high energy performance and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This includes the thickness of insulation panels, the efficiency of opaque and transparent envelope components, the use of solar and photovoltaic modules, and the performance of windows, doors, and mechanical systems.
- Bioclimatic approach – Concentrates on the relationship between the building and its specific environment, considering orientation, exposure to sunlight and wind, material selection, and spatial organization. The aim is to maximize or minimize passive energy gains depending on the geographical context. While bioclimatic strategies are often coupled with energy-saving measures, the reverse is not always the case.
- Ecological approach – The most comprehensive, integrating human needs within the local ecosystem by addressing both abiotic and biotic factors—physicochemical and biological processes—alongside sociocultural and symbolic processes mediated by architecture and urban planning. This approach regards the environment not as a mere backdrop or aesthetic context but as the central framework within which design operates. Conceptually, it aligns closely with the notion of place that I am discussing at RSaP—Rethinking Space and Place, understood as a systemic correlation of processes.
The ecological approach also carries aesthetic implications. As Malaysian architect Ken Yeang, a pioneer of ecological architecture and planning, has argued, bio-integration should become a defining and visible characteristic of future architecture and cities. By embedding ecological processes directly into design, architecture will not only support sustainability but also transform its own visual and cultural language.[8]
7. Between Ecology and Architecture
This ecological approach to architecture and landscape opens vast areas for exploration, with the potential to reveal entirely new fields of inquiry. To advance meaningfully, we must investigate the domains that separate architecture from ecology and actively work to bridge the knowledge gaps between them. Depending on the context in which they operate, architects should establish (or deepen) direct and productive collaborations with experts from fields such as climatology, geology, hydrology, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, ecology, sociology, anthropology, and human geography. Sustainable design strategies—at every stage—require an integrated understanding of physical, biological, and socio-cultural values, all of which are profoundly interrelated.
If such a radical integration of expertise were to occur on a broad scale, it might become reductive to speak of architecture in its traditional sense. We would either need a new term or extend the meaning of architecture to encompass a more comprehensive and interdependent way of designing, building, and dwelling.
Which fields, then, should architects explore at a fundamental level to bridge the gap between architecture and ecology? These may include: landscape ecology, bio-integration and biomimicry, regenerative design and permaculture, and site inventory analysis (involving climatology, physical geography, geology, hydrology, botany, ethology, anthropology, human geography, and sociology). Other important domains include urban farming and agriculture, green technologies, landscape design, and bioclimatic architecture. This list is far from exhaustive; it should remain open to individual inquiry. What must always be remembered, however, is that ethical values and considerations are inseparable from the foundations of a sound ecological approach to design disciplines—particularly architecture.
The rationale behind this transdisciplinary framework is to ensure cooperation across diverse professional domains in order to address the four interdependent states of place (or processes)—physicochemical, biological, social, and symbolic. Together, these states generate the multiple dimensions of reality, and of architecture understood as a constitutive part of that reality (see Image 3, bottom right).
Notes
[1] By the attribute ‘choral’, I mean the encompassing embrace of place across both concrete and abstract dimensions. Just as a chorus is composed of integrated parts that act in unison to produce a complete symphony, place too is composed of interdependent layers. The more concrete processes—physicochemical, biological, and social—are correlated with the more abstract processes that are specific to human beings: cultural and intellectual activities, collective and personal memory, aesthetic and ethical values, and above all, thought. By considering these four categories of processes together, we capture the full spectrum of reality understood as place—the realm where matter, life, society, and thought occur.
For the architect seeking to understand this full range of processes, it means recognizing that concrete processes (physicochemical, biological, and social) are inseparably linked with abstract processes (cultural, symbolic, ethical, and intellectual). Reality-as-place emerges through this interdependence. At a symbolic level, the architect mediates these processes through both scientific and artistic practice, thereby contributing to the integration of meaning within a place. To be place-sensitive is, therefore, to acknowledge and integrate all four levels of process into architectural work. If integration is achieved, the result is a symphony; if neglected, the result is a cacophony—a negative contribution to place.
At a more abstract or philosophical level, this interplay between concrete and abstract realms resonates with what Plato called chōra: an intermediate domain where concreteness and abstraction are interwoven. This is the source of my use of the attribute choral—to define place as an encompassing realm that integrates both dimensions. The American philosopher Edward Casey, in The Fate of Place, employs the more technical term choric to describe the spatial/placial ambiguity of chōra, understood positively as the condition of being both concrete and abstract.[Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 34–35, 41, 46, 48, 76, 467.]
[2] The term ‘ecology’, was coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1869; In the classical text ‘Fundamentals of Ecology’ by Eugene P. Odum, and Gary W. Barrett, we read that ‘the word “ecology” is derived from the Greek “oikos”, meaning “household”, and “logos”, meaning “study”. Thus, the study of the environmental house includes all the organisms in it and all the functional processes that make the house habitable’, in Eugene P. Odum and Gary W. Barrett, Fundamentals of Ecology, fifth edition (Belmont: Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 2005), 2.
[3] For the use and meaning of the term Anthropocene I redirect you to the following article by Paul J. Crutzen, “The Anthropocene”, in Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, edited by Ehlers and Krafft (New York: Springer, 2006), 13-18. See also note [14] in the article Urban Spaces or Places?
[4] Robert Goodland, ‘The Concept of Environmental Sustainability’, in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 26, 1995, 5, 10.
[5] Ibid., p.2.
[6] In ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005’, Ecosystems and human Well-being: Synthesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 1.
[7] For instance, in the period that passed from the time I wrote this article, in 2012, and the present days, the so-called ‘tactical urbanism’ or similar proposals (which we have briefly spoken about in the article Urban Spaces or Places?) are becoming diffused practices; they are an attempt to investigate the entanglement between social and environmental processes.
[8] Ken Yeang is a leading theorist at the intersection of architecture, planning, and ecology, with a career spanning back to the early 1970s. In 1974, he submitted his PhD dissertation at Cambridge University, later published as Designing with Nature: The Ecological Basis for Architectural Design (in Sara Hart, EcoArchitecture: The Work of Ken Yeang, ed. David Littlefield, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2011).
Many of the strategies I employed in my first architectural project explicitly exploring the relationship between architecture and ecology—the Badel Block Redevelopment in Zagreb, Croatia (2012)—were informed and mediated by Yeang’s decades of expertise across architecture, planning, and ecology. I consider eco-architecture, or bioclimatic design, a preliminary condition for architecture to achieve a deeper understanding of, and integration with, its place—beyond, though inclusive of, its traditional social and cultural values. Only by correlating physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and intellectual dimensions into a harmonic or choral synthesis (see note [1] above) can we approach a fully mature stage of architecture and planning, conceived as comprehensive artistic-and-scientific disciplines of place. Could this represent the ultimate, fully realized stage of the so-called “critical regionalism”?
Works Cited
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Crutzen, Paul J. ‘The Anthropocene’. In Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, edited by Ehlers and Krafft. New York: Springer, 2006.
Goodland, Robert. ‘The Concept of Environmental Sustainability’. In Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 26, 1995.
Hart, Sara. EcoArchitecture, the Work of Ken Yeang, edited by David Littlefield. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Publication, 2011.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC.
Odum, Eugene P. and Barrett, Gary W. Fundamentals of Ecology (fifth edition). Belmont: Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 2005.
Image Credits
Featured Image by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, CC BY-NC-SA: Badel Block Redevelopment, project, Zagreb, HR, with Croatian Ecologist Ivana Vojnic Rogic, 2012.
All other images by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, CC BY-NC-SA
