Fifty Shades of Green; an empirical analysis of sustainable design approaches in fifty case studies of contemporary architecture

It is largely recognized that the world is facing fast changes in the environmental conditions, in the economic structure, and in the social dynamics. In this context, the fields of architecture and urban design have been evolving and reacting, by: addressing issues; proposing innovative design and technological solutions; and envisioning potential sustainable scenarios in a structured manner. Yet the debate around the value and the identity of the sustainability aesthetic is still open (Hosey 2012). Despite the complexity of this theoretical debate, the aesthetic of architecture and urban design has, in practice, already started to shift under the influence of economic, environmental and social sustainability principles. With the aim of shedding light on these changing dynamics, this paper proposes an empirical analysis to compare and contrast the aesthetic approaches of fifty case studies of recent buildings, which have been awarded with International sustainability prizes and/or with high score certifications by the major energy rating systems across countries. Specifically, the analysis will offer an interpretation of the relation between economic, social and environmental principles and the design solutions that were triggered by those concepts. The results of this analysis will show a remarkable variety of successful design strategies, as well as a number of design opportunities that yet need to be explored. The importance of this work is: to produce a set of statistic data that can contribute both to practice and to the theoretical debate on the aesthetic of sustainability, by providing examples of cause-effect relations between sustainability concepts and design solutions; as well as to understand and assist the changing dynamics of our built environment.