Sustainable Design: Methods and Tools

The Material Transitions Lab series intends to challenge sustainability within architecture pedagogy. By enabling students to develop an ecological perspective through an analytical and critical attitude, today’s paradigm shift in building construction shall be examined. The five workshops conceive sustainability in architecture not as a given formula but as an ongoing set of collective sociocultural practices that students will need to actively embrace as future architects and global citizens.

Our entry point will be represented by materials most commonly employed in the construction industry. Drawing from Mark Jarzombek’s article “The Quadrivium Industrial Complex” (2019), which questions the most important building materials—concrete, glass, steel, and plastic—we will intentionally shift our attention from the so-called, and often debated, operational emissions of the built environment to the embodied emissions. These are defined as the sum of all emissions required to produce any goods or services, considered as if those emissions were incorporated or ‘embodied’ in the products themselves. The mining, production, delivery, and assembly processes of these materials have never been more extensive and cheaper than today, causing an enormous impact on a planetary scale for humans and non-humans and their possible evolution in the context of energy transition policies. In fact, energy transition and material transition are to be understood as one and the same process.

The five workshops (plus a wrap-up session) will elaborate on different thematic threads related to the sustainable transition of the construction industry and its materials, discussing innovation and criticalities. Referring back to Gottfried Semper’s theory of “Stoffwechsel,” material transition is here intended as a symbolic and physical transfer of forms and materials to new needs. Semper’s approach highlights the transregional sociocultural exchange of building construction and its materials from one culture and moment in time to another. With the notion of material transition—translated from German “Stoffwechsel”—the workshops foreground the process of outliving and mixing architectural elements and materials of the past to develop contemporary sustainable new materials for architecture. Semper’s intuition sets the stage to convey the complexity behind a holistic transition toward an ethical, sustainable construction industry.

All five workshops will center on the theoretical and practical understanding of the often invisible consequences determined by the construction industry on an ecological and social level for humans and non-humans alike, thus informing students on the global metabolism of architecture production. During the workshops, invited guests will join us to provide practitioners’ and scholars’ perspectives on a sustainable transition of materials, combining theory and practice.

What are the relevant agencies of sustainable design today? This workshop series addresses the complex relationship between theory and practice in the field of sustainable design. Architects are increasingly forced to develop a new attitude toward their practice, questioning the carbon legacy of 20th-century modernity. Although “practice” is commonly conceived as the counterpart of “theory,” the notion of a new “theory of practice” exceeds the dichotomy and promotes a specific approach to sustainability in architecture today. First and foremost, sustainable design depends on an awareness of the dialectics between theory and practice: Architects need to inform their ideas on sustainable design through a profound cognition of the construction sector and vice versa.

In the coming Spring semester 2025, the Chair of Theory of Urbanization and the Urban Environment will offer two seminars for undergraduate students that provide both intellectual foundations and critical awareness of the climate crisis. In the Climate Adaptation Lab (5 ECTS), we will focus on design methods that support evidence-based urban adaptation. In the Material Transitions Lab (2.5 ECTS), we will explore critical materiality that seeks a new understanding of architecture based on insights into embodied emissions.

In presence

25% Lectures
25% Seminars
50% Practice

Written during the semester
Oral during the semester