Ecological Urban Architecture: Qualitative Approaches to Sustainability

The goal of advancing eco cities often remains confined to political or technological issues. This book establishes a focus on architectural and infrastructural design approaches to sustainable urban planning. Starting out from a critical assessment of five prototypical eco cities of recent decades (Vauban/Germany, solarCity/Austria, Valdespartera and Sarriguren/Spain, Bo01/Sweden), the book identifies fields in which architectural and urban designers can use their creative skills and methods to achieve sustainable results on an urban scale. Sustainability is undergoing a shift of focus from quantitative measures toward designoriented, interactive interventions.

The range of qualitative solutions in ecological design is discussed here in four topical sections on “Materialize”, “Mobilize”, “Simulate” and “Transform”. For example, “Materialize” explores the potential of eco-design beyond the traditional palette of materials to show how spatial boundaries can be re-imagined as gradients of conditioned versus unconditioned space, working with climatic conditions rather than material boundaries to help generate new forms of urban architecture.

Contributions by experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and design theory, among them Achim Menges of Stuttgart University Institute for Computational Design, Federico Parolotto of Mobility in Chain, Edoardo Rico of Groundlab London, Sheila Kennedy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthias Sauerbruch of Sauerbruch Hutton, provide in-depth information on the complexity of eco-design in urban environments and emphasize the need for new sensibilities in disciplinary and trans-disciplinary thinking processes.