Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures

Explore pivotal intersections and themes between strategies for buildings and cities to adapt to shifting circumstances.

Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures introduces fourteen time-based strategies in architecture through a series of dialogues between experts. This format embraces a dynamic exploration of strategies ranging from Adaptive Reuse to Bio Design, revealing how each one addresses forces of change and adds adaptive capacity to the built environment.

The book’s structure invites readers to engage with these strategies on multiple levels. Each chapter begins with a framing of the fundamentals, providing context and key examples to situate the strategies in the wider field. At the core of each chapter is a moderated dialogue that offers key insights into how these strategies work in practice and how they can be used in combination. By presenting these strategies through dialogue, the editors demonstrate the collaborative thinking needed to address growing uncertainty in the built environment and provide readers with an actionable framework of technical and management approaches.

The book’s practical focus helps bridge the gap between theory and application, making this edited volume an invaluable resource for both academics and practitioners. Readers will find dialogues involving fifteen renowned experts in their respective fields:

Avi Friedman & Naomi Keena (Mass Customization) ↔ Michael Fox (Computationally Responsive Environments) / Bie Plevoets (Adaptive Reuse) ↔ John Dale (Open Building) / Aki Ishida (Metabolism) ↔ Michelle Laboy (Persistence) / Felix Heisel (Circular Construction) ↔ Jenni Minner (Preservation) / Kim Trogal (Repair) ↔ Brad Guy (Design for Disassembly & Adaptability) / Sarah Wigglesworth (Inclusive Design) ↔ Irena Bauman (Resilience) / Doris Sung (Smart Materials) ↔ Mitchell Joachim (Bio Design)

Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures presents:

• The fundamentals of each strategy, along with a short summary of each with its affordances and challenges and a few key examples
• The editors’ theory of primary time signatures, enabling readers to see and plan the combination of different time-based strategies to increase building lifecycle coverage for adaptive capacity
• Critical insights from thought leaders across a wide spectrum of approaches to sustainability

Academics, practitioners, and others interested in change in the built environment can use the strategies discussed in Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures to develop architectural solutions that accommodate climate change, shifting demographics, new live-work patterns, and many other uncertainties.