Sustainability
10 books on architecture, health, and climate change in 2023
A selection of essential readings for the practice of sustainable architecture
For International Book Week, we are sharing our selection of 10 essential readings for everyone interested in how architecture can contribute to improving human well-being and the future of our planet.
1. Material Health: Design Frontiers – Parsons Healthy Materials Lab
Recently published in February 2023, Material Health: Design Frontiers provides a general overview of the field of health in relation to building materials.
This book brings together leading activists, educators, designers, scientists, doctors, architects, contractors, and material innovators to explore critical issues of material health within the context of the climate crisis.
The book was initiated and edited by Healthy Materials Lab, a design research laboratory at Parsons School of Design, an institution focused on providing learning resources for professionals interested in placing human health at the center of all design decisions.
In line with the objective of this publication, Parsons School is committed to raising awareness about the risks of toxic chemical substances in construction products in order to create healthier places.
Material Health: Design Frontiers argues that there is an urgent need for new paths and practices in architecture and design to create healthier futures for everyone.
From a multidisciplinary perspective, it offers an overview of how design can be transformed to shape healthier lives and provides examples of how, through a deeper understanding of the fundamental issues threatening our communities, our planet, and the human species, we can radically change the future.
2. La oficina en casa (The Home Office) – Elisabet Silvestre
Our selection would not be complete without the latest publication from one of the leading health communicators in our country: La oficina en casa. Biologist Elisabet Silvestre has dedicated her entire career to the research and dissemination of health within our inhabited spaces.
She is the author of essential guides such as Tu casa sana (Your Healthy Home), which was featured in our 2022 Book Day recommendations, or Vivir sin Tóxicos (Living Without Toxics), present in our 2021 selection—an extremely comprehensive and rigorous book that examines every room and element of a home, detailing the risks and improvements we can apply to live in harmony and health.
In her latest book La oficina en casa, she delves into the conditions of our workspaces at a time when, following the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work dynamics are on the rise and companies are beginning to understand that ensuring the physical and mental health of their employees—not only through the quality of workspaces but also through flexible hours that facilitate work-life balance—improves performance and commitment.
This latest publication details the keys to creating a home office, improving the indoor environment to influence intangible aspects such as creativity.
The goal is to ensure the individual feels well through guidance on design decisions, such as prioritizing natural light, using natural materials, or incorporating elements that provide harmony, joy, or inspiration. Additionally, it includes recommendations on how to interact with technology in a healthier way and tools to create spaces for mental calm through concepts such as biophilia.
Starting with a simple walk through our home, this book inspires us with essential reflections on balancing personal and professional life, especially when both take place in the same living space, with the aim of living healthily in environments that represent us and make us feel good.
With the impeccable scientific rigor and the accessible, agile writing style that characterize Elisabet, the author invites the reader to share proposals to continue mutually enriching each other through collective experiences.
3. The Climate Book – Greta Thunberg
The well-known Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who managed to transform the fight against climate change with her Friday school strikes and inspired the entire Fridays for Future student movement, continues her journey in the struggle to halt global warming.
Following in the footsteps of her first book, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), the proceeds of which were donated to environmental organizations, she published a new book in 2022, The Climate Book, which aims to position itself as the “Climate Bible.”
In it, she brings together some of the most prominent scientists, experts, epidemiologists, activists, economists, journalists, thinkers, and storytellers of our era. From WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom and economist Thomas Piketty to novelist Margaret Atwood and best-selling journalists and writers David Wallace-Wells and Naomi Klein.
The book The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and the book On Fire by Naomi Klein were part of our recommendations last year in 2022.
Each of them has provided a brief reflection on how to address what has already been defined as the greatest threat to humanity.
Greta opens the book with a radical statement of intent: you cannot fight for what you do not understand, and therefore the book was born with the desire to make the problem known clearly and concisely to motivate more people to join the fight.
The key questions this book seeks to answer are: how the climate works, how our planet is changing, how it affects us, what we have done about it, and what we must do now.
4. IBAVI – El Croquis
The renowned architecture magazine El Croquis has published a monograph in its issue 219 (2023) on the IBAVI (Balearic Housing Institute).
For the first time, this prominent publication dedicates a book not to an architect but to the institution that has promoted the projects—a public body attached to the Ministry of Mobility and Housing of the Government of the Balearic Islands, whose main objective since 1986 has been the promotion and social rental of protected housing.
The IBAVI manages the public housing stock of the Balearic Islands under two essential premises: addressing the housing emergency and, simultaneously, the climate emergency.
They constantly promote new developments that follow the principles of their well-known project Life Reusing Posidonia, a development of 14 social housing units in Formentera that pioneered the use of natural materials such as posidonia seagrass.
Life Reusing Posidonia is a project funded by the European LIFE+ program for Nature Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation Projects, which received the 2021 LIFE Award for Best Environment Project from the European Commission, and serves as an example of the new architectural language that fulfills the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Furthermore, the organization develops resources based on an exhaustive analysis of the islands’ specific conditions, such as the Catalogue of sustainable materials of the Balearic Islands, to promote the use of local materials with a low CO2 footprint.
In addition to the architects awarded the projects, the role of IBAVI’s technical director, architect Carles Oliver, is highlighted as one of the architects of the Institute’s successful policies and the designer of several projects included in the publication. Together with the Institute’s director, Cristina Ballester, they have become true pioneers and an example for many other communities to follow.
The publication also features an article titled ‘A Necessary Experience’ by Albert Cuchí, a professor and researcher specializing in sustainability and architecture, and president of the Architecture and Sustainability association AUS, of which our firm is an active member of the board of directors.
5. UPSCALING EARTH – Anna Heringer, Lindsay Blair Howe, Martin Rauch
Martin Rauch is one of the most prominent earth builders in Europe and a promoter of the rammed earth prefabrication company Lehmtonerde, which has worked alongside distinguished architects such as Herzog & de Meuron.
In this book Upscaling Earth, he joins the renowned Anna Heringer, a pioneering Austrian architect in sustainable construction who received the prestigious Aga Khan Award in 2007 for works in Muslim countries and has developed notable vernacular projects in Bangladesh and Morocco, and Lindsay Howe, an urban planner and sociologist trained at ETH Zurich and author of numerous publications related to urbanism and sustainability.
First published in 2019, the book Upscaling Earth: Material, Process, Catalyst showcases innovative thinking regarding materials and the potential of earth construction to replace materials with a higher carbon footprint, such as concrete.
As its title suggests, the book explores the conditions necessary to produce an improvement in earth construction and presents a wide range of built and unbuilt earth projects, introducing revolutionary technological innovations that highlight the advantages of this material.
From global availability to the possibility of complete recycling, and from climate-neutral production to socially just implementation, the book reveals the incredible potential of earth architecture.
6. Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth’s Mineral Resources – Antonio and Alicia Valero
Thanatia comes from the Greek “θάνατος” (thanatos) and represents death. We can imagine a possible state of the Planet in which all commercially exploitable resources have been consumed and dispersed.
It would be a possible end to the “Anthropocene period,” a term created to designate the repercussions on climate and biodiversity caused by both the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases and the irreversible damage caused by the excessive consumption of natural resources.
Thanatia constitutes the starting point for evaluating the loss of the Earth’s mineral endowment.
The work of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, father and daughter, thermodynamic engineers from the University of Zaragoza, is fundamental to understanding the physical and geological limits of Planet Earth.
In 2020, they published the book Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth’s Mineral Resources in an interview format conducted by Dr. Adrián Almazán, where they explain in a didactic way and without technicalities what happens when the unlimited consumerism of capitalism clashes with a planet of limited resources.
Each passing year, the quantity and variety of mineral resources extracted increases. All technologies require large amounts of raw materials, some of which are very scarce. On a planet with limited resources, is it possible to satisfy the incessant demand of the global population?
Studying the consequences of excessive resource consumption from the perspectives of geology, mining, and thermodynamics is key to trying to prevent Gaia from eventually turning into Thanatia, a planet depleted of resources.
Thanatia is the description of this planet if we continue to exhaust its geodiversity. Climate change and digitalization lead to electric mobility, renewable energies with their batteries, robotization, and the Internet of Things; all these technologies require raw materials that already encompass the total elements of the periodic table.
The greater the extraction, the more energy consumed, the more degradation of ecosystems, and the more native populations affected.
Because products are not designed for recycling, technological waste grows and disperses, contaminating everything. Thus, there will never be enough for everything or everyone, and we know that in 25 years we will consume twice as much as today. The Anthropocene has run wild, which is why a material transition is needed—not just an energy one—that restores nature and effectively reuses materials. We must care for Gaia by extending life on Earth and slowing its degradation toward Thanatia.
7. Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity – Sandrine Dixson-Declève
In 1972, the report The Limits to Growth, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shocked the world by questioning the myth of economic growth and demonstrating that population and industrial growth were pushing humanity toward a precipice.
The essay was promoted by the Club of Rome, a think tank founded in 1968 that brings together a hundred scientists, economists, and other interdisciplinary profiles concerned with complex problems facing the world.
Today, the world recognizes that we are on the edge of the precipice: the Earth has crossed multiple planetary boundaries while widespread inequality is causing deep instabilities in societies. People are calling for a system change.
Thus, on the 50th anniversary of the first publication, some of the original authors of the report, along with a group of scientists and economists, have carried out an updated review that aims to become an essential guide for the survival of humanity.
For the first time, Earth For All sets out what system change really means for civilization. It is both an antidote to despair and a roadmap to a better future. Using innovative computer models, leading scientists and economists show how five extraordinary turnarounds are urgently needed to achieve prosperity for all within planetary boundaries in a single generation.
Its contents include the study of a clear path to reboot our global economic system; two alternative scenarios for this century: ‘too little too late’ versus the ‘giant leap’; and five steps to change the system that can end poverty and inequality and transform our food and energy systems by 2050.
Accessible and inspiring, this survival guide for humanity is a must-read for all those who need to see real solutions and take action.
8. Libérate de tóxicos (Free Yourself from Toxics): A Guide to Avoiding Endocrine Disruptors – Nicolás Olea
Endocrine disruptors are chemicals present in many everyday products such as plastics, pesticides, cleaning products, cosmetics, or food that can interfere with the human endocrine system by mimicking the body’s natural hormones or blocking their functions, altering the body’s normal balance and development and negatively affecting metabolism or other biological functions.
Dr. Nicolás Olea is a Professor of Radiology and Physical Medicine and director of the multidisciplinary group studying the relationship between environmental exposure and health at the University of Granada, focusing his attention on the link between endocrine disruptors and cancer.
After several decades of research, Olea and his team have become world leaders in the field. In this book, the researcher explains clearly what disruptors are, how they affect our bodies, and what effects they have on our health.
Furthermore, he establishes essential guidelines for reducing exposure to them in our daily lives with simple and effective solutions.
Written as a practical guide, it answers the questions we might all ask ourselves. What are they? How do they act? Why have we heard so much about them lately? To what extent can they affect our health? And that of our children? Are companies, institutions, and governments doing enough to prevent our continued exposure to them? What can we do to avoid them and protect our health and that of our families?
