Sustainability
Regenerative architecture
When construction prioritises respect for nature
Our health and the health of the planet are closely interconnected; there is no health on a sick planet.
And we are undoubtedly harming the planet’s health by exceeding points of no return, where ecosystems and biodiversity are damaged beyond recovery.
Air
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is responsible for approximately 7 million premature deaths each year worldwide. Air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), negatively affect respiratory and cardiovascular health, increasing the risk of diseases such as asthma and lung cancer. In addition, long-term exposure to air pollution can have neurological and child development effects.
Water
UN Environment estimates that between 8 and 12 million tonnes of plastic are dumped into the oceans each year, with a devastating impact on water pollution and aquatic ecosystems. Plastics degrade slowly, releasing toxic substances that harm marine life and human health. In addition, microplastic pollution—resulting from the breakdown of textiles, cosmetic waste, and cleaning products—accumulates in aquatic ecosystems and is ingested by marine organisms, with harmful consequences for aquatic life and the food chain.
Soil
According to reports from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), soil pollution poses a serious threat to human health and the environment. Soils can be contaminated by various industrial activities, inadequate agricultural practices, toxic waste dumping, and spills of hazardous substances. Soil contaminants, such as heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic chemicals, are absorbed by plants and enter the food chain, being taken up by organisms across all living beings, including humans, with negative health consequences.
Regenerativism
The term regenerativism began to be used originally in the practice of so-called regenerative agriculture, a form of farming that seeks to avoid overexploiting the soil through the use of fertilisers and pesticides and that ensures proper crop rotation to optimise food production and crop quality, while respecting and caring for the land so that it can maintain its own capacity to regenerate nutrients and microorganisms. [1]
Altering the balance of the soil also affects air quality. The use of fertilisers and pesticides reduces the soil’s ability to regenerate its microorganisms naturally, and in turn reduces its capacity to absorb CO2. It is estimated that trees store 40% of the carbon they absorb in the soil thanks to the presence of microorganisms.
Moreover, damaged soil, without microorganisms to keep it “alive”, is more likely to trigger a desertification process, which is estimated to already be occurring in 2/3 of the planet’s fertile land.
Finally, soil altered by an excess of fertilisers—natural or chemical—as well as the presence of pesticides is one of the main sources of groundwater pollution, posing a serious threat to human health and to the living beings that consume it.
This is how the disruption of ecosystems produces interconnected effects that upset the balance of multiple processes necessary for life and health on this planet.
This is where the need arises to ensure the natural regeneration of intrinsic environmental processes, avoiding causing harm.
In essence, ‘regenerative’ refers to a process or system that has the capacity to restore, renew, or recover its original state after being damaged or depleted.
It is a process that occurs intrinsically in nature.
What is regenerative architecture?
The term regenerative architecture was coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, published in 2002, the leading reference for the circular economy applied to architecture. [2]
In 1992, McDonough published the Hannover Principles, a document that proposes understanding our interdependence with nature and is based on considering all aspects of human settlement, including community, housing, industry, and commerce, starting from the recognition that all our actions affect nature’s balance and understanding architecture as an extension of place, flora, fauna, and the ecosystem. [3]
McDonough proposes creating buildings and environments that not only have a neutral or reduced impact on the environment, but are also positive and regenerative, improving the quality of their surroundings rather than depleting them.
Thus, regenerative architecture is understood as the practice of engaging the natural world as both the medium and the generator of architecture, treating buildings as part of a larger system that manages the natural, water, and energy resources that buildings consume throughout their service life, as well as the production of their construction materials.
Difference between regenerative architecture and sustainable architecture
In general terms, sustainability refers to limiting the use of resources, whereas regeneration replenishes them. Thus, replacing the principles of sustainable architecture with those of regenerative architecture means applying systems thinking in which architects stop seeing buildings as a container in themselves and instead understand them as an ecosystem whose processes must be restored, aiming for a net-positive impact rather than a neutral one.
Regenerative architecture seeks respect for architecture throughout all phases of its life cycle, including integrating users’ everyday life in harmony with other living beings and the environment. [4]
9 Principles of regenerative architecture
- Integrating nature
- Responsible land use
- Using natural materials
- Mindful use of planetary resources
- Water resource management
- Sustainable food
- Protecting health
- Community integration
- Creating regenerative cultures
1. Integrating nature
The first principle of regenerative architecture is designing buildings that integrate nature not only as a dynamic element, but also as a structural one, to meet users’ needs and even improve upon other buildings.
Therefore, a building’s design can imitate nature through biomimicry—a term coined by biologist Janine M. Benyus—incorporating plant mass into the building, and fostering a sense of connection with nature through disciplines such as biophilia and neuroarchitecture.
Vegetation can absorb CO2; reduce the urban heat island effect by providing shade and moderating outdoor air and surface temperatures around the building—a feature that, at an urban scale, is more than beneficial; purify and filter the air of impurities such as pollution; regulate ambient humidity; using permeable ground instead of hard surfaces around the building helps moderate external temperatures; and, in the case of green roofs, it acts as a thermal buffer—along with psychological benefits such as relaxation and improved concentration. [5]
2. Responsible land use
When we talk about land use in architecture, we should not confuse it with its urban planning definition; in climatic terms, land use refers to how the surface of all land in a specific place is used, at a given time and within a given space.
This use defines human activities that are directly related to the land, drawing on its resources and inevitably impacting them.
Implicitly, both built environments and fields and pastures involve modifying the natural environment and nearby wildlife. Today, around 70% of the Earth’s ice-free land surface is affected in one way or another by human activities.
The approach proposed by regenerative architecture is to integrate buildings into the surrounding context, both biotic (living elements of an ecosystem) and abiotic (non-living elements of an ecosystem such as light, air, water, or minerals), and to conserve material and land resources through optimised siting that respects existing vegetation and minerals, minimises intrusion, and preserves the permeability of outdoor space. [6]
Applied to architecture, these are solutions that optimise a building’s footprint on the site, siting it respectfully and allowing the natural processes that previously occurred to continue without additional impact—allowing rainwater to follow its course and be absorbed by the natural ground, organisms to regenerate, animals and insects to inhabit the area, and existing vegetation to be respected and integrated with new native species.
3. Using natural materials
Construction materials account for 11% of global carbon emissions, making it essential to opt for locally sourced, minimally processed biomaterials.
In fact, as buildings become increasingly efficient and stop consuming energy, emissions from the materials production phase become ever more significant, highlighting the need to reduce the impact of construction material manufacturing and installation processes.
In addition, even when building with low-impact materials, it is necessary to consider creating closed loops in which renewable materials—and especially non-renewable ones—can be recovered at the end of their service life and reused indefinitely. The industry should evolve towards circularity, implementing cradle to cradle methodologies that make it possible to recover materials at the end of their service life so they can be regenerated for other uses or in other locations without further ecological impact.
We must move towards the idea that any building can be understood as a materials bank that can be disassembled and turned back into raw materials for another production cycle.
The use of biomaterials not only has a positive impact on the planet’s health and the use of finite resources, but has an even greater effect on people’s health. This is the case, for example, with natural insulation compared to plastic-derived alternatives, which not only perform better in terms of breathability and humidity regulation—improving the quality of indoor environments—but are also materials that can be recovered, reused, or returned to the earth at the end of their service life, without further impact on the environment. [7]
In general, materials that are minimally processed, free of toxins, whose layers or components can be easily dismantled and reused, or that at the end of their service life can be reintegrated into a productive cycle or else biodegrade or be returned to the earth without ecological impact, are those that meet the criteria of regenerative architecture.
4. Mindful use of planetary resources
Regenerative architecture does not pursue the efficiency of the resulting buildings through excessive use of technology and active systems; rather, from the moment it understands construction as interconnected with the ecosystem, it advocates reducing the use of planetary resources.
This means designing with the climate and reducing the need for complex technology that uses rare and scarce minerals with costly processing, which hinders natural degradation or the reintroduction of these resources into nature. If we implement bioclimatic strategies such as orienting the building to take advantage of solar gain and local winds, we reduce the need for active inputs and, consequently, energy and resource consumption.
McDonough says buildings should be like trees and cities like forests; in other words, he envisions a future with carbon-capturing buildings, as if they were just another element in a natural ecosystem. This represents a radical paradigm shift. In fact, we stop talking about consuming buildings and start talking about producing buildings—producing oxygen and energy through local, renewable energy resources drawn from the immediate environment, such as solar and wind power, and the use of simple, highly efficient energy systems such as aerothermal energy or geothermal energy. [8]
5. Water resource management
In recent years, it has become clear that freshwater scarcity is increasing due to drought caused by climate change. However, this same emergency also means that torrential rains can suddenly fall on arid land that cannot absorb them, generating floods with catastrophic consequences.
It is necessary to become aware of the severity of the water problem in the same way that has happened with carbon emissions from finite fossil fuels. In fact, regenerative architecture focuses on water resource management, which involves classifying different types of water and distributing them across different networks depending on their uses. Challenging some recent assumptions—barely more than a century old—that make no sense at all, such as flushing human waste with drinking water or directing rainwater into the public sewer system, is key to initiating a shift in mindset and designing sustainable water management systems not only at an individual level, but also at the community and city level.
Installing rainwater storage systems is essential; they also reduce the need for drainage during heavy rainfall, especially in urban environments.
Once used, water can be reused by separating it into grey, yellow, and black water systems. Grey water is water used in the shower or washbasin and, with simple treatment, can be reused for toilet cisterns and irrigation. For yellow and black water, total oxidation wastewater treatment systems are currently available that allow it to be used for irrigating gardens and even vegetable plots.
In addition, following the logic of resource saving, black water can be removed from the equation by opting for a dry toilet, which makes it possible to turn this organic waste into compost to enrich the soil. [9]
6. Sustainable food
Beyond integrating nature into regenerative architecture, it is possible to go one step further and understand land use from a productive perspective.
Our lifestyle has a significant impact on the environment, in addition to the consumption of the buildings we live in. Thus, regenerative architecture takes a holistic view of the whole and proposes food self-sufficiency.
In other words, instead of going to the supermarket to buy food that has travelled around the world, we can design edible gardens, moving away from the monoculture agricultural model and embracing practices such as permaculture, which combines different species that support one another and improve biodiversity.
Regenerative agricultural techniques not only restore the land, but are also more efficient by producing more food per hectare. Many even propose combining livestock and agriculture in a symbiotic relationship in which the waste from the former feeds soil fertility. Overall, it is possible to achieve food self-sufficiency on the site itself or through exchange within a local community.
This paradigm shift also involves rethinking a consumption model in which we eat vegetables from climates that are not our own, such as tropical fruits and vegetables ripened on the planes that transport them. [10]
7. Protecting health
Regenerative architecture focuses on people and other living beings, based on the premise that users’ health is closely linked to the health of the environment.
Understanding our interconnection with the planet in terms of health means understanding that we are not the sum of parts that can be controlled; rather, the Earth and all its species, including ours, form a living, complex system that does not function in a linear way. [11]
Solar gain and natural light, good ventilation, achieving a comfortable temperature without excessively drying the air… are some of the basic guidelines that define a healthy space and directly affect our wellbeing—not only physical, but also psychological and emotional.
8. Community integration
The concept of an interconnected ecosystem that regenerative architecture speaks of recognises the human need to live in community and proposes an architecture that addresses the need for a social network that supports us—and that we, in turn, can support.
Collaborative and ecological housing, with proposals such as cohousing, are models that seek to reclaim that space between the private and the public: a shared space that shapes relationships of care and mutual support. This can be highly beneficial, as it makes the community much more resilient in the face of adversity and more efficient by sharing energy and food production, or even means of transport. [12]
Examples such as cohousing communities in Central and Northern European countries show how land management by public authorities—enabling right-of-use models occupied by communities of ecological homes that share resources, spaces, and farmland, while also living interconnectedly by supporting one another, sharing vehicles and spaces, and living a community life in harmony with the surroundings—are paradigmatic cases of how humans can improve our quality of life through mutual respect and cooperation.
