Sustainability
10 books on architecture, health, and climate change in 2022
Our selection of essential books to navigate the current architectural landscape in a climate emergency scenario
Today, April 23, International Book Day, we share our selection of 10 essential reads for all those interested in how architecture can contribute to improving people’s well-being and the future of our planet.
1. Tu Casa Sana – Elisabet Silvestre
Tu casa sana. Guía práctica para cuidar de ti y del planeta (Your Healthy Home: A Practical Guide to Caring for Yourself and the Planet) was written by Elisabet Silvestre, a Doctor in Biology, with master’s degrees in Human Biology and Bioconstruction. Her professional work has focused on genetics and subsequently on environmental health, specifically the role of indoor environments in homes and buildings on people’s health.
She is currently a leading expert in biohabitability, a discipline that investigates and analyzes how to design, renovate, construct, and inhabit spaces that are healthy for people and the environment. She teaches this subject in various courses, master’s programs, and postgraduate studies; she is a speaker at conferences and workshops; she participates as an expert in projects and consultancies, contributing her knowledge in human biology and habitat biology; and she collaborates with health and architecture professionals.
She is the author of books such as Geobiología y biohabitabilidad: la salud a través del hábitat (Geobiology and Biohabitability: Health Through Habitat) (2006), Casa saludable (Healthy Home) (2009), and Espacio con valor ambiental (Space with Environmental Value) (2013).
In 2014, she wrote the book titled Vivir sin tóxicos: Cómo ganar bienestar y salud en tu vida cotidiana (Living Without Toxins: How to Gain Well-being and Health in Your Daily Life), a reference work in biohabitability but with a more technical character. In 2019, the same publisher, RBA, asked her to publish a more practical book, aimed at the general public with easy tips for the daily lives of residential architecture users, which is when Tu casa sana began to take shape.
In it, Silvestre shares strategies with the reader to transform their home into an ally for their health, revealing the keys to making their house a healthier place with just small changes, learning how to breathe cleaner air, eat healthier and more consciously, care for their skin with natural products, sleep well with truly restorative sleep, and reduce stress.
The author will guide us with the aim of achieving a real, conscious, and transformative change, through positive habits to live healthier, with fewer toxins, to activate the body’s self-healing and regenerative potential, and to lead a more conscious lifestyle that allows you to live every moment fully.
“Dear reader,
This book you hold in your hands began to take shape in 2019, and as it grew and matured, the health alert due to the coronavirus arrived, a situation that has made the home gain prominence. Until then, daily life usually took place inside the workplace building; little time was spent at home; in fact, the home acted more as a Morpheus. But, with the experience of confinement, the home has become a true refuge, a dwelling, but also an office, a school, or a gym.
For many, this experience has meant discovering their home, learning more about that space they live in and which, until then, they had not associated with how it can contribute to well-being, comfort, and health.
Perhaps after this experience, we need less theory about the role of housing in relation to health. Never before had we spent so much time in it, literally confined. And since the brain integrates through experience and emotion, we cannot deny that both have been very present during this period, and surely something has changed within us.
All of this can represent a before and after in the real perception of housing, in the appreciation of spaces with natural light, cross-ventilation, or access to the outdoors, even if it’s just a small balcony.
Thus, this book is born at a time when the interior space of buildings and homes is in the spotlight. Throughout six chapters, we will focus on our home, on the aspects that most affect health, on what can help us maintain our immune system more balanced and healthy – as well as the respiratory, nervous, and hormonal systems – and on fostering a home environment that promotes the body and mind’s ability to self-regulate and maintain self-care biological systems in shape.
The current situation highlights the need to apply a new, more global concept of health in relation to the quality of the indoor environment of our homes. The objective of this book is to provide options for rethinking habitable spaces, focusing on making them healthier and more sustainable to promote the health and well-being of their inhabitants and the planet. I hope it is useful to you and contributes positively to you making a real change to live in a healthier home.” [1]
2. The New Climate War – Michael E. Mann
The New Climate War. The fight to take back our planet is a work by Michael E. Mann, a renowned climate scientist and American geophysicist, who shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change.
Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways we’ve been told we can slow climate change. But the overemphasis on individual behavior is the result of a more than thirty-year marketing campaign that has successfully placed the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.
Fossil fuel companies have followed the lead of other industries that deflect blame. Thus, they manage to block efforts to regulate or price carbon emissions, conduct public relations campaigns aimed at discrediting viable alternatives, and have abdicated their responsibility to solve the problem they created. The result has been disastrous for our planet.
With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo, social tipping points will not occur without the active participation of citizens everywhere to aid in collective advancement.
“The Architects of Disinformation and Misdirection
The origins of the ongoing climate wars lie in disinformation campaigns undertaken decades ago, when scientific findings began to clash with the agendas of powerful vested interests. These campaigns aimed to obscure public understanding of the underlying science and discredit the scientific message, often by attacking the messengers themselves—that is, the scientists whose work implied we might have a problem on our hands. Over the years, tactics were developed and refined by public relations agents employed to undermine scientifically based facts and warnings.” [2]
In his work, Mann argues that not all is lost. He draws the battle lines between people and polluters and outlines a plan to force our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change, which includes a review of the currently proposed version of the Green New Deal. [3]
3. Biophilia – E. O. Wilson
Biophilia. The Love of Nature or That Which Makes Us Human is a wonderful and unorthodox memoir by the most important and influential biologist and naturalist of our time, Edward Osborne Wilson. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, his specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, in which he was called the world’s foremost expert. Near the date of his passing in December 2021, the first Spanish version, translated by Teresa Lanero Ladrón de Guevara, of his most important work: Biophilia, from 1984, was published. [4]
This book is not simply about biology; it is an unorthodox memoir, interwoven with fascinating observations and unexpected autobiographical anecdotes. It is also a necessary declaration of philosophical and ethical positions in a world dominated by the dizzying pace of mass species extinction and climate change. These reflections by a field biologist on the multiple meanings of wild nature illuminate the evolution and complex beauty of our endangered ecosystems and the flora, fauna, and civilization they sustain, while also revealing the personal evolution of one of the greatest scientific minds of our era.
Wilson coins and defines the concept of biophilia in these pages as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” And he tells us how the millions of years during which Homo sapiens related so closely to their environment created a deep emotional need to be in intimate and constant contact with the rest of living beings, whether plants or animals.
“Modern biology has established a new way of observing the world that, coincidentally, aligns with the orientation of biophilia. In other words: in this exceptional case, instinct aligns with reason. The conclusion I present is optimistic: to the extent that we understand other organisms, we will value them more and also value ourselves more.” [5]
The satisfaction of this vital desire is as important for human beings as establishing relationships with other people. Just as we feel good when socializing, we find peace and refuge when we walk through the forest, approach the sea, contemplate a wall devoured by vines, or spend the afternoon with our dog.
Its author skillfully connects facts, history, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and his own professional or daily experiences to demonstrate the existence of this bond and the fundamental importance of preserving it. And he also proposes different ways to rekindle it, because both our existence and that of the rest of the living beings that accompany us on this planet ultimately depend on the survival of this ancestral connection.
4. The Uninhabitable Earth – David Wallace-Wells
“Those of us who live in a skyscraper in New York will also die,” thus began the interview offered by Wallace-Wells, one of the most prominent climate change journalists at the NY Times, for the launch of this indispensable book on the scenarios that await us.
Wallace-Wells is deputy editor of New York magazine, where a few years ago he published a viral article on climate change, in which he bluntly exposed the calamitous costs of doing nothing, or, perhaps more realistically and therefore more threateningly, of doing something but not enough. [6]
The Uninhabitable Earth. Life After Warming starts from the premise that our world is ending and asks: what can we do?
This chilling account of how we are precipitating the planet towards its Armageddon reveals unimaginable threats, even in our worst nightmares.
Today, rising sea levels are a cause for widespread alarm among those who have already abandoned the pernicious dream that global warming is a myth. However, it is not even the tip of the gigantic iceberg of unimaginable horrors threatening life on Earth: fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods… All these disturbing manifestations of climate change, already recurrent for millions of people, are just a preview of what is to come: famines, plagues, unbreathable air, increasingly massive migrations, economic collapse, and even global armed conflicts.
With terrifying precision and lucidity, David Wallace-Wells constructs a kaleidoscopic narrative of the consequences that our impassivity in the face of the ecological crisis will have in just one generation. Harshly emphasizing how we have failed to imagine and, above all, to promote a better future, The Uninhabitable Earth transports us to an imminent future and offers us the definitive reflection on how we have devastated our own home; all of this as a fervent and even more urgent call for change.
5. Flourish – Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency offers a fresh and compelling argument from two leading urbanists and architects, Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn, who answer the question: what does it take to restore balance to our world for the survival of future generations?
More than a manual on how to make the most of our narrow window of opportunity, this book is an invitation to imagine a different range of possibilities and a call to action to move towards a truly regenerative and cooperative way of life. It is a critical yet imaginative approach to how all of us, not just humans, can thrive in a time of intense urban growth.
The work proposes a set of regenerative design principles, drawn from natural and cultural wisdom, offering a paradigmatic plan for designers, clients, and change agents to build a prosperous future together. Its objective is to transform the way we design, manufacture, and manage our buildings, infrastructure, and communities. Thus, it goes beyond “sustainability” to explore “regenerative” practice, what it truly means, and how we can get there together.
“A growing number of people are deeply concerned about our planetary emergency and are asking how we can rise to this seemingly insurmountable challenge. We wrote this book because we believe that the necessary changes lie primarily in cultural, rather than technological, transformation, and that this must occur at the level of mindsets—the shared ideas that determine how society functions. Working in the built environment, this (broad) field is our main point of reference when defining these changes and how we might implement them. We consider these changes essential for the evolution from ‘sustainable’ to ‘regenerative’ design and development.” [7]
Throughout the book’s chapters, a series of key concepts emerge that will need to be transformed into new values and objectives towards which we must direct ourselves to implement regenerative practice and achieve a paradigm shift: from optimism-pessimism to possibilism, from “the future is inevitable” to “we can influence the future,” from the “conquest of nature” to “interconnected humans in a web of life,” from short-term to long-term perspectives, from competition to mutualism, from quantitative growth to qualitative development… [8]
The authors realize that the answer to their initial question lies in nature, from which it is possible to relearn the perspectives and tools necessary to support the flourishing of all life, forever.
6. Designing Regenerative Cultures – Daniel Christian Wahl
The publisher Ecohabitar, known for its magazine of the same name, published the Spanish version in 2020 of Daniel Christian Wahl’s original 2016 book Designing Regenerative Cultures.
Ecohabitar describes it as a “catalog for the entire planet” for the 21st century, a striking and exhaustive analysis of the deficiencies of our societies, organizations, ideologies, worldviews, and cultures, and how to correct them. The book covers the financial system, agriculture, design, ecology, economics, sustainability, organizations, and society in general. [9]
Its author presents a holistic and interdisciplinary vision stemming from a background in biology and zoology combined with his two passions: traveling the world and teaching diving. Thus, it is no coincidence that by the age of 28, he had already visited 35 different countries on six continents, an experience that led him to decide to focus on sustainability and sustainable communities.
This work explores ways in which we can rethink and understand the crises we currently face and how we can vitally move forward into the future. The transition from thought patterns and beliefs to our practices of education, design, and community living systematically shows how we can stop pursuing the mirage of certainty and control in a complex and unpredictable world.
The author starts from the question, “How can we create conditions conducive to life?”, which serves as a guiding thread to organize reflections on how we can collaborate in creating diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of each place.
“We need to ask the deeper question of why our sustainability is worthwhile. Our answers will form the basis for asking more functional questions and how we implement provisional responses and solutions. This deeper approach will shape the ‘how,’ the way we might take intelligent actions to help us transition to regenerative cultures. Starting with the ‘why’ will help us understand our own deep motivation, as well as our deepest purpose and goals.
We need to question the beliefs that determine our worldview. Only by starting with the ‘why’ will we be able to inspire others to change their behavior and to co-create regenerative cultures.
We need to reflect on how we will have to change individually and collectively to create this future. By asking these questions together, we may come to understand that we will have to collaborate as a single species and learn to transcend and integrate our differences if we want a prosperous future for all humanity.
We need to ask important questions about ‘why’ and ‘what if…’. We need to rediscover the common ground of the human community. This will allow us to co-create a future worth living in. We need a collective discourse about who we are and why ensuring the survival of the human species is worthwhile, a shared discourse powerful enough to keep our innovative, creative, and cooperative spirit alive as we ask ourselves about the what, how, when, and where.” [10]
7. Comment habiter la terre – Yona Friedman
A utopian architect and Hungarian theorist, Yona Friedman published more than he would build throughout his life. His name became known following his collaboration with the avant-garde architectural group Archigram, which in the 1960s drew inspiration from technology to propose a new neo-futuristic reality expressed solely through hypothetical projects.
However, his participation in the creation of the first Israeli residential settlements in the 1950s allowed him to experience an architecture unknown to him, architecture conceived with the inhabitants themselves in a process he would later call self-planning. There he understood that success depends on the will of individuals and, with the help of his elegant yet schematic drawings, he wrote his famous book Utopies réalisables (Feasible Utopias), which grounded his initially utopian desire for a new architecture in executable projects.
The book Comment habiter la terre (How to Inhabit the Earth), without a question mark, was first published in 1976, as it was written and drawn for a United Nations conference on human settlements held in cooperation with the French Ministry for Quality of Life.
From the outset, it was conceived as an illustrated survival manual of 16 lessons, outlining the problems faced by man-as-inhabitant in an ecosystem and proposing solutions for continuing to inhabit the earth in a context of scarcity. It concentrates essential resources such as “seeking survival alternatives,” “reorganizing the earth,” or “changing mindsets.”
Composed of comic strips drawn in a column on the left and handwritten captions in capital letters on the right, the simplicity of the stick figures carrying out their activities responds to the author’s imperative need to convey his thoughts to the public through a simple, meaningful, and interpersonal language. The book opens with the author’s explicit intention:
“The purpose of this publication is to induce the reader to reconsider the place of man-as-inhabitant in an ecosystem and to lead them to reflect on solutions for the survival of their species, in a context of scarcity or a lasting or temporary crisis. If the language used stimulates the reader to reflect on this problem, this work will have achieved its purpose.” [11]
Forty years after its first publication, in a context of crisis that is no longer lasting or cyclical, but endogenous, the problems then evoked by Friedman, as well as the solutions he proposes, are exactly those we still face today, and those that urgently need to be taken into account if we want to continue inhabiting the earth. The last sentence of the book: “any non-commercial reproduction of this document should be encouraged,” a piece of advice that reflects his desire to reconcile architecture and society.
8. From Passive House to the Passivhaus Standard – Micheel Wassouf
With the full title De la casa pasiva al estándar Passivhaus. La arquitectura pasiva en climas cálidos (From Passive House to the Passivhaus Standard: Passive Architecture in Warm Climates), this 2014 publication by Gustavo Gili directly references the increasingly well-known concept of the passive house, whose origins date back to the 1970s. However, it was not until the creation of Passivhaus, the German-originated energy optimization standard for residential construction, that this sustainable architecture practice came of age. Thus, the book relates the Passivhaus standard to the legacy of passive architecture, placing it in a broader context of modern architecture.
Its author, Micheel Wassouf, has worked as an architect in various European countries and currently resides in Spain, where he was the first Passivhaus certifier. His company Energiehaus has developed the first buildings on the Iberian Peninsula according to the Passivhaus protocol and has trained Spanish architects on the subject, as it is an accredited training company of the Passive House Institute.
Since the first Passivhaus building was constructed in Germany in the early 1990s, the Passivhaus protocol has been successfully applied in buildings worldwide, from the cold city of Oslo to tropical Shanghai. This book explains the concept of passive architecture and its most relevant strategies for warm climates, distinguishing between traditional and current technological concepts. It also explains the Passivhaus standard and explores its application within the framework of warm climate territories.
Thus, this work is presented as a method of thinking, a technical tool rather than a typical manual, that teaches us to think from the origin of a project to keep in mind the criteria that would allow us to create a low-energy consumption building.
For the most part, it is an update on the concepts and definitions of the topic. The introduction presents current trends, the regulatory frameworks that define the protocol, which is an environmental certification, what construction standards allow us to define a work as passive, and what is understood by a nearly zero-energy building.
The publication is structured into three chapters: passive architecture, the Passivhaus standard, and a third section where the PHPP (Passive House Planning Package) tool is applied to reference buildings in temperate and warm climate countries. For example, it introduces the energy characteristics of common materials typically used and found on the market and teaches their correct use, what to consider when designing, how to use them with an energy-saving criterion…
With a practical and direct approach, the author presents the basic concepts of this construction standardization, the current technologies it works with, and the fundamental guidelines for its application in representative warm and tropical climate cities such as Madrid, Lisbon, Mexico City, or Rio de Janeiro. The presentation of various examples of Passivhaus buildings demonstrates the viability of the standard in these areas. [12]
9. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – Bill Gates
The book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is a necessary and rigorous work in which Bill Gates presents a comprehensive, functional, and, above all, affordable plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero and avert an environmental catastrophe in time.
This American entrepreneur from the computer industry has dedicated a decade to researching climate change, thanks to the advice and guidance of experts in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance. His area of study has focused on determining what measures we must take to stop the planet’s race towards irreversible environmental disaster, gathering basic information to make the population aware of the need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions to offer a lucid description of the challenges we face.
Leveraging his knowledge of innovation, he details characteristics of the fields where technology is already helping to reduce emissions, how and when current technology will become more effective, and who is working on these much-needed advancements. Finally, he outlines a practical plan to achieve zero emissions, both through governmental policies and on a personal level, thus involving governments, businesses, and ourselves in this crucial mission. [13]
10. On Fire – Naomi Klein
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal is a work by the renowned Quebecois journalist, writer, political activist, and filmmaker who for over twenty years has been the most important chronicler of the economic war waged against people and the planet, and has incredibly advocated for a far-reaching ecological plan whose main axis is justice.
Among her elegant reports, written from the front lines of contemporary natural disasters, we find a series of intense and indispensable essays for the public that bring us prophetic and urgent warnings about the future that awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as glimpses of hope for a much better future.
This publication brings together, for the first time, over a decade of unpublished material on the overwhelming consequences of our immediate political and economic choices. These extensive articles show her most prophetic and philosophical side, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one.
She delves into issues ranging from the conflict between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now” to the inspiring story of humanity’s capacity to change and evolve rapidly when faced with grave threats. Passing through the rise of white supremacy and borders turned into fortresses as a form of “climate barbarism,” in what constitutes a call to action to save a planet on the brink of collapse.
With chronicles from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef or the skies choked by smoke year after year in the Pacific Northwest, from a hurricane-battered Puerto Rico or a Vatican trying to instigate an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” the author tells us that we will only rise to the existential challenge posed by climate change if we are willing to transform the systems that have caused this crisis.
These pages are a far-reaching investigation that considers the fight for a more sustainable world cannot be separated from the fight for our lives. To this end, this work captures the urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal. [14]