Ecological Urban Architecture reviewed by Design Online

Ecological Urban Architecture by Thomas Schroepfer takes an in-depth look at architectural and infrastructural design approaches to sustainable urban development.

Ecological Urban Architecture: Qualitative Approaches to Sustainability identifies fields in which architectural and urban designers can use their creative skills and methods to achieve sustainable results on the urban scale, and places focus on aspects of the ecological. Thought leaders from around the world provide information on the complexity of ecological design in urban environments in response to four topical themes for creating qualitative outcomes: Materialise, Mobilise, Simulate and Transform. Each section explores emerging methods and tools for ecological design, looking at how these have started to infiltrate current practice through different ways of measuring, representing, communicating, adapting and designing buildings and the metropolis. While many of these methods resist or offer strong opposition to being standardised and replicable – as every design environment is different, climate conditions change and environmental efficiencies and impacts vary – they illustrate how ecological urban architectures perform within their own setting and their potential for future growth and adaptation.

A series of case studies examine and analyse a number of recent and current built experiments of ecological urban architecture. Each case study spotlights a project that engages social and environmental sustainability, and looks at its ideals and ideas, tools and implementation and then offers a critique of the project. The case studies are the result of a Harvard University Graduate School of Design interdisciplinary research project that began in 2006, which documents and describes dominant themes of progressive projects and cities that implemented sustainability policies and procedures for the design of urban architecture and landscape architecture. Many of the projects reveal that today’s focus is on energy reduction, alternative urban transport, and the addition of green spaces, which is supported by attitudes on community formation and development, engagement with open space and green infrastructure and architectural resolutions of addressing environmental measures.

This book is for anyone interested in sustainability, architecture and humanity’s place within the environment. While it’s most suited to architectural and urban designers interested in learning about new paradigms of ecological urban architecture, anyone who is curious about new ways of living and understanding would find a most fascinating read within the pages of Ecological Urban Architecture: Qualitative Approaches to Sustainability.

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