Place-specific design: Architecture for Visible Sustainibility

Place-Specific Design: Architecture for Visible Sustainability promotes a visibly sustainable architectural approach that is rooted in place. As a direct response to the sustainability crisis and homogenizing effect of globalization, visibly sustainable architecture seeks to reverse the ongoing loss of diversity in all senses of the word. As place-specific design, it identifies and restores the ecological and cultural characteristics that give places their unique character. Examples drawn from prominent firms worldwide, including Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Steven Holl Architects, Glenn Murcutt Architects, Foster + Partners, Herzog & de Meuron, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel, demonstrate the diverse and highly innovative solutions that emerge from insightful consideration of local culture and ecology, enhanced by the appropriate use of modern technologies. Place-Specific Design maps out a blueprint for how the socially-conscious architect can contribute to the promotion of a “non-autonomous” architecture: architecture that reunites nature and human nature in an interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship.

Valeriano C. Zarro, PhD, AIA, is an architect and author who holds a Doctoral Degree in Architecture and Urban Design from KTH, the School of Architecture in Stockholm, Sweden. His thesis, Towards Achieving a Sense of Place has served as the foundation for subsequent articles and practice that promote an architecture rooted in place. As Zarro Design Workshop Architects, his focus on the restoration, renovation and rehabilitation of urban structures earned him several Historical Preservation Awards. His writing has appeared in various architectural magazines, “Progressive Architecture”, “Architectural Record”, and “Environmental Design + Construction”.

Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology