The Canning Town Caravanserai was a temporary (5-year) occupation of a vacant brownfield in east London. It was initiated by the Ash Sakula Architects in collaboration with EXYZT, The Building Exploratory, and a host of other local organisations and individuals. 

Historically, "caravanserai" refers to a roadside inn or rest stop in the Middle East and Central Asia, where travellers could rest, exchange goods, and socialise. The Canning Town Caravanserai embodied this concept by creating a space where locals could come together and exchange ideas, skills, and resources. 

The project involved repurposing shipping containers, reclaimed materials, and sustainable construction methods to create a series of temporary structures, including a café, workshop spaces, gardens, and performance areas. These spaces were designed to host various activities such as workshops, markets, performances, and community events. 

The Habitat for Orphan Girls is a ground-breaking prototype of an orphanage designed to challenge the dictated way of life of orphan girls in Iran. It builds on vernacular architectural introversion to create a safe, nurturing environment while allowing the girls to be a part of the world beyond the orphanage's walls on their own terms. 

The Haus der Statistik is a GDR-era office building from the 1970s in Alexanderplatz, previously destined for demolition. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the building fell into a state of neglect. Various proposals for its redevelopment were discussed, but none came to fruition, and the building remained unused, becoming a symbol of post-reunification challenges in urban planning and development. In the late 2010s, a significant shift occurred driven by community and cultural stakeholders. Artists, cultural organisations, and local activists recognised the potential of the building as a space for creative and community-driven uses. They began advocating for its preservation and redevelopment. Responding to this grassroots movement, the City of Berlin took a more active role in the redevelopment process. There is currently a revitalisation initiative for the building, envisioning and negotiating its conversion into a mix of affordable living and working spaces. 

Cavendish House is a contemporary addition to the street front of Cavendish Avenue, designed to respect the milieu of (mostly Victorian) detached houses along it. It has a mass timber structure and is divided into two main volumes: a small, shingle-clad and protruding volume emulating the front bays of neighbouring houses, and a main, cuboid volume clad in glass and cement fibre, hosting most of the house’s functions. 

The Organization for Desert Development asked well-known architect Hassan Fathy to design a new agricultural village near the Kharga Oasis after discovering water resources in 1963. Hassan Fathy was known for his low-cost village for agricultural worker families in New Gourna, another pioneering project built 20 years prior. Fathy, who generally attaches importance to creating a strong community with inhabitants in his projects, used architecture as a tool to enable 250 families with no ties to live comfortably in this isolated land. He started his research with demographic, geographical, and climatic data on the land and people in 1963. The construction started in 1964 but was never completed due to the Six-Day War of 1967 and changes in regulations regarding earthen buildings. By then, the administration building, several housing units, the museum and social centre’s outer shell, and the market, which would be the project’s heart, had been built. This project’s constructed parts, drawings, and documentation are critical examples of sustainable architecture for passive cooling and vernacular architecture and are valuable for the sustainability discourse, depending on the context. 

The Heelis Centre is the headquarters of the UK’s largest charity, The National Trust. The brief for the project was to create the most sustainable building possible at the time within the available budget. Named after Beatrix Potter, it houses offices, meeting spaces, and embodies the National Trust’s commitment to conservation and environmental responsibility. 

The Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre is a notable project located in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was designed by the Danish architectural firm Henning Larsen Architects in collaboration with the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. It is clad with a crystalline façade inspired by basalt formations and gained great cultural importance in Iceland, becoming one of its greatest attractions. 

The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre was designed to celebrate the vernacular Kanak culture, the indigenous culture of New Caledonia. The complex comprises ten distinct cylindrical structures, reminiscent of traditional Kanak huts, arranged in a spiralling layout across a tropical landscape. The centre houses exhibition spaces, conference rooms, theatres, and workshops, providing a platform for showcasing Kanak art, history, and cultural practices. It also includes outdoor amphitheatres and performance spaces for cultural events and celebrations. 

The architectural language of the centre was inspired by the material culture of the Kanaks and informed by advances in sustainable construction technologies. 

Pirkkala church hosts the worship and clubhouse spaces of the Pirkkala Parish. Using natural light as the main means of creating a sacred and immersive atmosphere, the building creates DELIGHT for the local people. The church is built in close connection to its surrounding ENVIRONMENT, as the architecture competition winning entry of Käpy and Simo Paavilainen was named after the nearby creek Pyhäjoki (Sacred River). 

Rwanda’s new national cricket stadium’s motto is “sports for all.” The stadium has a symbolic significance as a step towards achieving the country’s goal of moving from an agriculture-based economy to development with a local workforce. The stadium located at Kigali welcomes citizens of all ages to play cricket and improve and gain sports and life skills. The project aims to build self-confidence, create new local labour-intensive construction jobs, use local materials, and lower carbon. Thus, most of the materials in the stadium project were sourced locally. Rwanda Cricket Stadium is vital to diversifying the country’s economy, strengthening social cohesion, and promoting the sports for reconciliation after the 1994 Rwandan genocide. 

The project is located in Hormuz Island, Iran, in the Persian Gulf, where most of the population lives off tourism. The Strategic Document for the Spatial Planning of Hormuz in 2019 decided to develop the island as a touristic attraction to both local and foreign tourists from the neighbouring Persian Gulf. The main aim is to build a mutual economic and cultural bond between tourists and the people of Hormuz. Presence in Hormuz consists of a cultural centre called Rong, a Monitoring and Management Centre called Badban, and a cultural residence called Majara. The buildings are spread over an east-west axis in the island’s northern part, where settlement is concentrated. Presence in Hormuz 2 is a project which involves different stakeholders and professionals and was developed with participatory design principles from the beginning to post-occupancy. 

Located in Kasungu, Malawi, the Maternity Waiting Village aims to improve the conditions of mothers before, during, and after giving birth. Most importantly, the design aims to prevent evitable causes of maternal death by providing solutions, that promote HEALTH AND WELLBEING. Most of Malawi’s population lives in rural areas, affecting their ability to access professional care during childbirth. Local public authorities have decided to act by building 130 maternity waiting facilities across the country in places close to healthcare centres. The facility should be able to accommodate expectant mothers and their relatives, starting from the 36th week of pregnancy until delivery. The previous prototype for the facility failed in multiple aspects, so the initiative partnered with MASS Design Group. MASS collaborated with public authorities, researchers at the University of North Carolina, doctors, nurses, and expectant mothers in Malawi to design a holistic prototype that can be used as a model for other maternity waiting villages. 

Paimio was designed as a tuberculosis sanatorium in the homonymous Finnish town of Paimio. It combined the principles of healing architecture of the late 19th and early 20th century with the novel ideas of the modernist movement and with Alvar and Aino Aalto’s (then unusual) sensitivity to users’ lived experiences. 

Wall House is situated outside the city limits of Auroville, in Auromodele, an area designated for research and experimentation. It is situated 10 kms north of the town of Puducherry and 5 kilometers from the coast, in South India. The Auroville community was established to tackle a multitude of environmental and social problems that the area was facing, including water scarcity, soil erosion, social inequality, and inadequate social infrastructure. 

The Wall house was designed to be Anupama Kundoo’s private residence in Auroville. Its spatial program serves two major objectives. On the one hand, the building effectively and economically serves the everyday needs of the dwellers. On the other, it has the potential to be easily expanded making room for guests. In this project, the architect redefines the very meaning of private-residence design challenging permanence and testing various spatial and technological innovations to be used in future designs. 

The City of Melbourne posed an ecologically focused design brief for the proposal of Council House 2, often referred to as CH2 or CH2. The project’s goal was to set a sustainable example for Melbourne’s future development projects, as the city had its sights set on carbon neutrality by 2020. It adheres to the then newly launched Green Star rating system, a list of criteria developed by the Australian Green Building Council (GBC), which incorporates aspects from LEED and BREEAM. The project uses biomimicry to perform passively where possible, employing the building’s thermal mass to keep cool, and a reactive façade which helps in shading the interiors. 

'No footprint house' is a toolbox for building low-emission, affordable, and prefabricated houses. It has been realised in several iterations and used as prototypes for improving the toolbox. Here, we are going to discuss the overall development of the toolbox and the first, most well-known prototype in Ojochal. 

With a spiralling landscaped ramp and an array of bioclimatic strategies, the Solaris office building works as an extension of Singapore’s One-North Park, where it is located. According to Singapore’s sustainable building benchmark, Solaris has received the highest rating (platinum). 

Hammarby Sjöstad is a district with low environmental impact in Stockholm developed from a former industrial area. The project, initiated in the 1990s, follows a holistic approach towards systems stewardship, including solid waste, water, transportation and energy systems. Hammarby Sjöstad serves as an international model for sustainable neighbourhood design. 

Lisbjerg Hill is a social housing complex in a suburb of Aarhus with a prefabricated, flexible, and reversible hybrid wood construction system. The project was designed to exemplify a new holistic approach for a better building practice, encompassing a wide range of sustainability parameters (energy, carbon footprint, durability, community building). 

A mixed development of 400 homes consisting of family homes, co-living, homes for the elderly, green houses, provision for food production, restaurants and jobs for 100 people. The project claims to address all 17 of The United Nations Sustainable Development goals through its design strategies and is concerned with sustainability in a very broad sense, from the construction of the place to how the scheme will perform and provide for residents in the future. The project is the result of an open international competition won by Lendager in 2017 and is currently in its first phase of construction.