It is an oft-quoted—and always alarming—statistic that 34 percent of the world’s carbon emissions are caused by the construction industry, with a significant portion borne specifically from the production of concrete required to erect a standard structure today. At the same time, we are facing a global housing crisis, as a large population of people moves from rural towns into cities, outpacing the number of affordable, high-quality units being built to accommodate them.
So how does one put these two crises in alignment? Around the world, innovative architects, scientists, and engineers are exploring building techniques and materials that can create places to live without hastening climate change. The secret? Keeping it local.
The concept of embodied carbon—the emissions released across the lifespan of a material, from extraction, manufacturing, and transportation down to disposal—dictates that the most sustainable architecture is built from its surroundings. Forward-thinking minds are tapping both high- and low-tech building methods and materials in every region of the world. From solar-powered pods that can handle the most extreme weather on Earth to residences built, literally, from the earth that surrounds them, each project presents a solution specific to its site, culture, and vernacular—but that can potentially be adapted for use in farflung places.
The design lessons that can be gleaned from all the examples below are found in their commitment to both planet and people.
Fire-Resistant Timber in California
Over the last decade, Seattle-based architecture firm Atelier Jones has been exploring the construction and design potential of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most accessible new building materials, mass timber. Both sustainable (for its local harvesting, low-carbon nature) and structurally strong, the engineered wood product is also highly fire-resistant.
After firm founder Susan Jones led the charge for the International Building Code to allow the material’s deployment in higher construction, she used it to design Heartwood, a 67,000-square-foot apartment building in Seattle that in late 2023 became the first tall mass timber structure in the US. Jones and her team then put the promising material into practice in the small Northern California town of Greenville.
There, in collaboration with local nonprofit Sierra Institute for Community and Environment, they created the Sierra Houses, three prototype mass timber homes whose capacity for prefabrication would allow them to rapidly and affordably rebuild a community that was itself devastated by fire in 2021. In one-, two-, and three-bedroom models, the lean-to or gable-roofed residences feature Cor-ten steel and aluminum façades surrounding a mass timber structure that, visible in the open-plan interior, also serves as an aesthetic feature. In similarly forested areas of the country, this innovative material has the potential to create safer, environmentally sensitive, locally sourced homes.
Solar-Powered Pods in Antarctica
The coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth is, by international law, not a permanent home to any human residents. Plenty of scientists and intrepid tourists, however, stay for lengths of time on this South Pole landmass—and the buildings that house them must withstand an environment where average outdoor temperatures range from 14°F on the coast to −76°F inland.
White Desert, a hospitality company that offered the first luxury hotel experience in Antarctica, is still the most innovative for on-land stays. Its two explorer camps, Echo Base and Whichaway, comprise highly insulated, igloo-like pods whose modular construction allows them to sit lightly on the landscape and be completely dismantled without a trace at the end of their lifespan. Inside, these domes offer floor-to-ceiling windows and futuristic living spaces that take advantage of Antarctica’s biggest summer resource: 24-hour sunlight. The suites, including the first showers with running hot water in Antarctica’s hospitality industry, are entirely powered by solar and wind energy, proving that even in the harshest environment, buildings can adopt good-for-the-planet design solutions.
White Desert CEO and founder Patrick Woodhead developed the pods in-house with his expedition team. “For us, true luxury is about creating a sense of ease and comfort in an extreme setting,” he says, “while ensuring that Antarctica remains exactly as we found it.”
Compressed-Earth Blocks in Niger
In Niger’s capital, Niamey, where rapid migration has led to a severe shortage of affordable places to live, architect Mariam Issoufou is using West African vernacular to create high-density, climate-resistant urban housing.
Relying on local compressed-earth masonry blocks and passive thermal design, Issoufou and united4design collaborators Elizabeth Golden, Yasaman Esmaili, and Philip Sträeter built Niamey 2000, which offers 18,300 square feet of multifamily living space, including private courtyards. Similar to precolonial mud-brick construction in Mali, Nigeria, and Niger, thick earthen walls regulate indoor temperatures, while shaded circulation areas and well-sited windows also help assure resident comfort during the city’s extremely arid heat waves.
The project proved so successful that Issoufou has continued to incorporate compressed-earth blocks into her eponymous practice, which has offices in Niamey, New York City, and Zurich. She is currently constructing an office tower with bricks made from soil collected right on-site; it will be the tallest building in Niamey when completed and cooled using minimal energy thanks to its material performance and self-shading triangulated facade.
In a place where most contemporary buildings are constructed of concrete and cooled via standard air conditioning units, Issoufou’s work demonstrates that traditional techniques and site-derived materials are not only better for the environment, but also a high-performance option for the people who will occupy them.
Light-Touch Living in New Zealand
“Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous people, live by a series of underlying natural principles and behaviors,” says Stephen McDougall, a founding director at Studio Pacific Architecture in Wellington, the country’s capital. “Guardianship is one of these principles.”
Adopting this obligation to the land, McDougall designed Kāpiti House, his personal off-grid retreat set within 16 acres of regenerated wetlands on the Kāpiti coast, just north of Wellington. The home is designed to leave little trace on the environment and is operationally carbon positive, removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it contributes.
Two rural vernacular structures—a 1,750-square-foot barn for the main house and a separate two-story tower for guests—form the compound, which is constructed of cross-laminated timber, tempered hardboard, recycled local rimu wood, New Zealand wool insulation, and fly ash concrete. All these materials have a significantly lower carbon footprint than their standard counterparts. Thanks to solar panels, rainwater collection, on-site wastewater treatment, and a permaculture garden and orchard, the project is self-sufficient. Passive design strategies, including deep eaves for self-shading, cross-ventilation, and a high-efficiency envelope, mean it requires no heating or cooling.
“This approach reflects a shift from designing isolated buildings to designing systems that support the land over time,” says McDougall. It also sets a stunning example of low-impact rural living.
Earthquake-Safe Wattle and Daub in Chile
In extremely seismically active Chile, an 8,000-year-old residential construction technique has proven one of the best defenses. Quincha, or wattle-and-daub building, covers an interwoven wood framework (wattle) with a mixture of mud and straw (daub), waterproofed with a thin layer of lime plaster. The lattice-like timber structure and heavy thermal mass make it inherently stable, allowing it to shake without damage.
The ancient method—which is both sustainable and hyperlocal because the elements can typically be found on-site—is now being revived by forward-thinking architects for earthquake-safe, passively cooled housing projects across the country. Outside of the capital city of Santiago, architect Marcelo Cortés recently designed the 1,075-square-foot, two-story Casa Peñalolén using quincha metálica, a contemporary version of the technique that covers a steel frame and metal wire with tecno-barro, or mud stabilized with lime, to reinforce walls and ceilings.
Architects Bárbara Barreda and Felipe Sepulveda, cofounders of the Chilean firm Base Studio, are also exploring the historic style of architecture in a new organic form, adding local clay to the material mix by enveloping the house in 10,000 fired tiles. While the project is still in the works, the duo is building a 1:1 scale mockup this fall.
Bamboo, Bricks, and Recycled Plastic in Malaysia
Architect Eleena Jamil has built her eponymous firm in the Malaysian state of Selangor around contextual architecture, “a departure from the modernist ideal of the air-conditioned glass box prevalent in many tropical developing regions,” she explains. “In Malaysia, the standard way of building [contemporary] houses is based on reinforced concrete floor slabs and frames, with plastered brickwork for walls. Roofs are typically held up by metal trusses and covered with interlocking tiles.” Her practice aims to present a lower-carbon, locally sourced alternative.
About 40 minutes south of the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, on the one-acre site of a former palm oil plantation, Jamil has designed a 4,000-square-foot home with a 1,600-square-foot studio using a melange of innovative local materials, including bamboo culm columns and roof trusses, compressed-earth block walls, roofing made of recycled plastic food containers, and salvaged hardwood doors, furniture, and fencing. Her firm occupies the studio, while the house will host family, friends, and potential design workshops.
Drawing from traditional Malay design and construction, which deployed a mix of natural materials chosen for their passive heating and cooling properties, Jamil oriented her courtyard-centered buildings away from direct sun, raised them slightly from the ground with strategic wind gaps at low and high elevations, and created large overhangs for comfortable indoor-outdoor circulation and living.
“Experimental in nature, [this project] is drawn from my practice’s longstanding interest in material culture … and how to create an architecture that grows from place,” says Jamil. “It is an approach in which the form is a direct response to the climate and how people use the space, with a materiality inspired by their vernacular origins, and that does the least possible damage to the planet.”
In a country with hot, humid weather, this context-driven design creates a space that is naturally cooler than a standard structure, and a construction process that minimizes waste and use of heavy machinery while taking advantage of local materials.
Rammed Earth in England
The site of a former Victorian brick factory in the Wiltshire countryside of Southwest England had a bounty of clay-rich soil. To build an 8,720-square-foot private home on it in 2024, London- and Andermatt, Switzerland-based architecture firm Tuckey Design Studio explored an ancient technique that would take advantage of that abundant supply: unstabilized rammed earth.
The material is a manually compacted mix of water, clay, gravel, and brick and concrete aggregate from the demolition of the site’s original unusable structure, and it contains no chemical binders. With technical assistance from Austrian specialist Martin Rauch of Lehm ton Erde, the team devised an on-site circular construction method: building whole walls layer by layer with a rammer that compresses the mixture into a wooden formwork. With castle-like walls made from the natural material that surrounds them, the abode’s design is enhanced with Douglas fir and oak frames as well as cedar shingle roofing and copper drainpipes.
While the project is one of the only modern-day examples of the rammed-earth technique in the UK, the firm is proving its potential to scale. Since the compound’s completion, the team has designed a community of 30 terraced rammed-earth houses in nearby Gloucestershire, where the soil has a similar clay profile and enough construction waste aggregate to prefabricate blocks of the revived historic material.
This article originally appeared on Architectural Digest.
