As buildings are responsible for fifty per cent of CO2 emissions, their design has become the focus of intense
technical scrutiny. Knowing how to build more technically efficient, or ecologically responsible, buildings, and
being able to assemble the social resources to do so, requires different forms of knowledge and practice. There
is wide contestation over the optimal pathways to greener buildings design and great diversity in practices of
sustainable architecture.
This volume brings together leading researchers from across the European Union and North America both to illustrate
the diversity of practice and to provide a critical commentary on this key debate. The reader is provided with
an introduction to competing perspectives on the sustainable architecture debate, international exemplars of differing
practice and an overview of new theoretical and methodological resources for understanding and meeting the conceptual,
social and technical challenges of sustainable architecture.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: The Paradoxes of Sustainable Architecture
2. Re-Interpreting Green Design: Beyond Performance and Ideology
3. Theory, Practice, and Proof: Learning from 'Buildings that Teach'
4. The Social Construction of 'Green Building' Codes: Competing Models by Industry, Government, and NGOs
5. The Politics of Design in Cities: Preconceptions, Frameworks and Trajectories of Sustainable Building
6. Equal Couples in Equal Houses: Cultural Perspectives on Swedish Solar and Bio-Pellet Heating Design
7. Safe Houses and Green Architecture: Reflections on the Lessons of the Chemically Sensitive
8. Revaluing Wood
9. Policing Sustainability: Strategies Towards a Sustainable Architecture in Norway
10. Green Buildings in Denmark - From Radical Ecology to Consumer-oriented Market Approaches?
11. Leaky Walls: Challenges to Sustainable Practices in Post-Disaster Communities.
12. Social Research on Energy-Efficient Building Technologies: Towards a Sociotechnical Integration
13. Conclusion. Reflections and Engagement: Towards Pluralists Practices of Sustainable Architecture
