Article 2:

Foundations of Design Thinking for A Sustainable World

Architectural Transformations that Shaped the Path to Sustainability and Beyond

Architecture is far more than building design it is a mirror of human values, cultural priorities, and environmental consciousness. As civilizations evolved, so did their approach to shelter, space, and resource use. Architecture has always played a pivotal role in how societies interact with the environment. In the context of building sustainability, the history of architecture reveals a fascinating progression from adaptation to domination, and now to regeneration. This article explores key architectural transformations through history that reflect humanity’s shifting relationship with sustainability, each marked by innovations that either enhanced or challenged our ability to live in balance with the Earth.

I. Vernacular Architecture: Designing with Nature

Prehistoric to pre-industrial societies used only locally sourced materials, were intrinsically climate-responsive, and left a relatively minimal environmental footprint. Vernacular architecture refers to indigenous and traditional building methods that emerged out of necessity and intuition. These structures were rooted in the natural environment and evolved to meet local needs and climates. Adobe homes in the American Southwest built from earth, clay, and straw, provided insulation from heat. Yurts of Central Asia were portable, efficient structures made from felt and wood - ideal for nomadic life, and still in use today. Japanese Minka Wooden houses with deep eaves and sliding walls adapted to seasons. Passive design, local sourcing, and climate-specific strategies were inherently sustainable long before the concept existed formally.

II. Classical and Monumental Architecture: The Rise of Symbolism and Permanence

Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome developed large-scale stone construction, with the emphasis on durability and symbolic power. While classical architecture often prioritized grandeur and authority, it also introduced innovations in material use and urban planning that laid early groundwork for sustainable cities. Roman aqueducts and baths are early examples of water management infrastructure. Greek “agoras” and “stoas” were public spaces designed to foster civic life and walkability. Durability and infrastructure, designed with foresight, mattered for efficient urban systems to reduce waste and improve quality of life.

III. Islamic and Middle Eastern Architecture: Innovation in Climate Control

From the 7th Century onwards architecture began to exploit and respond more innovatively to habitat conditioning in areas that had extreme temperatures, using passive cooling techniques such as courtyard planning and light and airflow manipulation in the arid regions. Islamic architecture pioneered passive energy techniques still relevant today. In Iran wind catchers called “Badgirs” are used to channel wind into homes and cool them naturally. Similar, ornate latticework called “Mashrabiya” screens, allow ventilation and privacy while reducing solar gain. In colder regions the approach was to increase thermal mass for energy storage absorbing heat from the sun to reduce the internal climate variation by delayed temperature transfer through the night. What this tells us is that climate-responsive design doesn’t need modern technology, and that our first approach for better architecture within eco-systems, to respond to local climate, is still the intelligent use of form and materials.

IV. Medieval to Renaissance Europe: The Compact City

From 5th to 17th Centuries, Medieval cities composed urban densification, mixed-use buildings, and communal infrastructure, and emphasized tight-knit communities, walkability, and multifunctional spaces reflecting early principles of sustainable urban planning. Italian hill towns like San Gimignano were vertically oriented, compact settlements minimizing land use. Dense, walkable, multifunctional environments reduced resource use and supported community resilience. However, great lessons were to be gained through large scale plagues, burning cities, and social revolutions, emphasised a spiralling degradation of the human condition on the one hand, but driving and inspiring movements such as the Renaissance period on the other. Led predominantly by artisans and creatives seeking creative solutions, challenged cultural and social thinking in art and architecture. Renaissance city planning, such as Palmanova for example, demonstrated early experiments in geometrically organized cities with integrated services. Specialised trades and apprenticeship models became more valued for increasingly more complex urban infrastructure and building detail.

V. Industrial Era Architecture: Mechanisation and Mass Consumption

The 18th to 19th Centuries accelerated steel and concrete construction fuelled by the Industrial Revolution. This led to large scale urban sprawl paralleled with a disregard for ecological limits. This era marked a sharp departure from all prior habitation models. Architecture became a tool of industrial ambition, often prioritising efficiency over harmony with nature. Crystal Palace (1851) was a marvel of prefabrication and glass use, foreshadowing modern building systems that funnelled early visions of humans as the ultimate creator and controller of all things. Tenement housing drove economies to house an explosion in exploited worker populations, being economical but overcrowded, and highlighting the social cost of unsustainable and mass produced development. Unchecked industrialisation simultaneously exploited and degraded the natural and built environments, and subsequently quality of life. New technology was the driver for accumulating resource wealth, power, and profit for the privileged few who controlled these assets. Global expansion of empires spurred by depleting and contaminating industrial city conditions and local resources, combined with new technologies accelerated spreading industrialised urbanism and Western cultural building models into all corners of the earth.  The Victorian model showcased a new status hierarchy in templated “Villa” housing models. Whilst an innovation demonstrating template plans and efficient supply chains for mass housing production, these designs had a total disregard for any local vernacular or climatic response in their plan, form, or orientation. This era in architecture is dominated by carte blanche Western ideals imposed on newly claimed and occupied lands, with the rapid installation of whole new “Westernised” settlements. These engineered outposts came with coal and steam powered factories, ships, and trains laying inter-connecting transportation and supply line networks, extraction and moving more, faster. Adaption to using local materials, such as native timbers and even animal products that were prevalent, and expanding Western agricultural, commercial, and industrial systems were instrumental to mass environmental exploitation, extinctions, and native population displacement. The increasing model of resource extraction and processing for mass consumption as the formula for success and wealth at all cost, was commoditised wealth not serving the people and the planet but the Industrialists themselves. The new modern economic machine rapidly expanded with the onset of the inevitable globalisation of humans, mass colonisation and the crossing-over and convergence of diverse cultures. Vernacular assimilation of local knowledge and traditions rooted in geographic isolation and symbiotic connection was mostly lost.

VI. Modernist and Post-War Architecture: Form Follows Function

From early 20th Century to the 1970’s, Minimalism, with the use of predominantly steel, concrete, and glass as advanced building materials formulated building standardisation for achieving unprecedented vertical structures. The Modernist movement pushed for simplicity, mass production, and universal design principles, but often neglected any environmental context other than the token and highly manicured subservient landscaped gardens. Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse was a visionary but flawed attempt at an urban utopia emphasising automobiles and high-rises. The Bauhaus movement focused on functionality, craftsmanship, and industrial materials. Ultimately though, this period of architecture defines systemic human disconnection and departure from our intrinsic connection to the natural world, with whole populations now drawn to participate in the grand visions of international architectural influence driving individualism and the nuclear family models, the automobile love-affair, and measuring success through grandiose material wealth. The increasing demand for fossil-fuels controlling global markets to support booming working class populations, The Great Depression, World Wars, and on-going Western Capitalist vs. Communist conflicts continued to put environmental concerns on the lower ranks of global political priority. Functionality was highly mechanised with advancing complex technologies, products, and materials. Initially driven by the wars, now being designed and developed in a race to catapult humans beyond earth and into space, to colonise far-off planets in exponentially far-off solar systems, but ultimately morphing their way into modern suburban consumer house-holds. The pinnacle moment in time, looking inwards and not out, as we had always done, and seeing our finite planet for the first time, floating in the abyss of an open and seemingly infinite space. To advance, aesthetic and structural innovation needed to be integrated with ecological and social systems. Systemic environmental and planetary collapse was now clear and inevitable without collective engagement and the willingness to all work together for a greater good.

VII. The Green Building Movement: Technology Meets Ecology

The 1970’s to early 2000’s a new earth science and greater conscious of all things now connected, was established. This period marks the birth of “Green” architecture, driven by energy crises, social and geo-political influence, and a new environmental awareness. This is reflected in many prominent “Eco” architecture initiative projects like the “Earthships” as off-grid homes made from recycled materials and utilising passive solar heating in New Mexico. Ambivalence between the new emerging advanced techno consumerism and the desire to re-embrace nature and to protect people and the environment divided visionaries. Certification systems and regulations began to guide sustainable design. New sensory and data technology transformed measuring of material and eco-system lifecycles from the linear “take-make-waste” extraction to waste quantum, to quantifying the new earth science of environmental impact using a circular model, verifying and closing the loop on science based planetary systems. Ecological awareness in design became intentional with new regulation, digital technology, and innovation beginning to converge globally. Energy efficiency, environment protection, renewable materials, and indigenous voices all regained a place in a new architectural vocabulary that pitched diversity against homogenisation, and accelerating global awareness of “Sustainability”. With the introduction of digital design and the data information age, facilitated accurate, measured impact of design with the ability to model and project long-term outcomes based on gaining greater historical and real-time data. Simultaneously, with increased building composition complexity, exposing toxicity in new building materials affecting health, exponential inefficiencies in waste outcomes, excessive embodied and operational energy use, and in response to modern building systemic failures such as the New Zealand Leaky Building Syndrome (Part 1: External Moisture), provided the perfect storm for new global questioning to set new parameters for international building standards that included protecting the environment and human welfare. With increasing examples of large-scale carbon-neutral housing communities, BedZED in the UK, set a president to redefine our collective wellbeing and survival, averting a planetary crisis, and a new world vision to sustain long-term quality of life on Earth for all.

VIII. Regenerative and Biophilic Architecture: Living Systems Thinking

2010’s to the present has seen acceleration from Sustainability and Net-zero to Net-positive energy, greater integration with ecosystems, and prioritising user well-being. Today’s cutting-edge architecture aims not just to “do less harm” but to actively regenerate ecosystems and human health. Nature is no longer an externality - it is integral of the design process. “Living buildings” such as The Bullitt Center in Seattle produces its own energy and water. Similarly, the Bosco Verticale in Milan are residential towers with vertical forests that reduce urban heat and improve air quality. The Zira Island Master Plan in Baku is a planned carbon-neutral development inspired by Azerbaijan’s topography. Design is now systemic. Buildings can become ecosystems producing energy, cleaning air, and restoring biodiversity, giving back more than they take and measured in Whole Life-Cycle Analysis. Transformation from linear to circular, to regenerative, is now accelerating building sustainability focused on long-term investment over short-term profit.

Reflection: Design Thinking for a Sustainable Future

Design thinking in architecture is now entering it’s most critical and creative phase. From passive vernacular strategies to regenerative smart buildings, architecture’s trajectory reveals that sustainable progress is both a return to timeless principles and a leap into integrated innovation. The foundation of sustainable design lies in empathetic problem-solving, deep ecological awareness, and an understanding of place, people, and purpose. As we build the future, architecture must continue to evolve - not just to shelter, but to heal.

In the next article:

Building Sustainability: Article 3 – Materials, Methods, and the Circular Economy in Construction.