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 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. 

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. 

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. 

'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). 

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. 

The concept of 2226 is to provide a building with a comfortable range of interior temperatures (22oC to 26oC) without any heating, air conditioning or mechanical ventilation. The temperature range is guaranteed by a combination of thermal mass and natural ventilation, using the heat emitted from the bodies of the users and the office devices as energy sources. The concept has been applied to buildings in different locations and has since become a standalone research and development program within the Baumschlager Eberle practice, but here the focus is on the first example building of the series, built in Lustenau.

The GC Prostho Museum Research Centre is a research facility for a renowned dental health company, GC, that develops dental prostheses. The building functions as a laboratory and office space for 40 personnel but also has an exhibition space on the ground floor for the public. The project is known for its unique wooden structure that originates from the system of Cidori, an old Japanese toy.

The Gando Primary School was built to expand the sparse network of schools in the province of Boulgou, in the east of Burkina Faso, and addressed two characteristic problems of many educational buildings in the area: poor lighting and ventilation. In order to achieve sustainability, the project was based on the principles of designing for climatic comfort with low-cost construction, making the most of local materials and the potential of the local community, and adapting technology from the industrialized world in a simple way. Underlying the project was a strong didactic component: it was designed as an exemplar that would raise awareness in the local community of the merits of traditional materials, updated with simple techniques that would need few new skills. The school building includes three volumes, each containing a classroom measuring 7 x 9 metres, connected by a single roof make up the basic structure of the building, and each one of them accommodates one classroom for fifty students.