Architects Journal, Opinion, June 2026
It’s unfortunate that it’s possible to design in a ‘low-carbon’ but still entirely unsustainable way, argues Nicoletta Michaletos
Fixing our carbon problem is now widely agreed as the priority for a society in climate crisis, but the core fault lines are deeper and more thoroughly embedded than that. There is a longer-term concern, a bigger issue at play really, which looks to how we choose to do this.
There is a world in which we are ‘low-carbon’ but still entirely unsustainable. The global unease around food and economic stability, drought and urban migration are deep-set civilisational insecurities triggered by poor management of land, resources and nature. All of which have been downplayed significantly in current models, and all of which consideration of carbon just cannot account for and if anything, obscures.
Still, locally and globally, in policy and in the news, carbon is the headline. In the UK, carbon targets are the showcase for sustainable building, and carbon is the single most emphasised topic across the UK Green Building Council’s output.
To grasp the real footprint of a building, however, imagine an invisible thread behind each material, reaching from its origins at extraction, over continents, through factories, furnaces and truck journeys, in and out of warehouses, through hands of workers and into cities.
We don’t need much imagination to picture how each of these nodes takes up space, depletes locality and habitat, is resource-intensive and polluting, and relies on people power. This is the real footprint that is ‘embodied’ in every little thing: it is a whole life cycle of activity, not just carbon.
So, carbon as proxy for ecological sufficiency is an oversimplification we cannot and should not sustain. Reducing emissions or reducing ‘harm’ more generally is not the same thing as pursuing models that repair, preserve and maintain earth systems.
Supply chains, for example, have shown us that they can be tweaked to be ‘low-carbon’, but these still carry vast footprints, depleting locales and natural systems: an unfired brick still needs sourcing, production, logistics.
This predicament may not apply universally but, for the built environment, it is clear and unambiguous. We deal with resources, nature and planning every day. The construction sector is the largest consumer of raw materials in the UK, with sand, stone and cement claiming the largest material footprint since 2000 and producing roughly 60 per cent of total waste.
Reframing the problem to a proactive ecological sufficiency stance and away from the reactive carbon priority is not the work of architects alone. But with design there is power in sidestepping the chains of industry and ‘universal style’ of construction.
Invisible Studio’s House in an Olive Grove (pictured above), for example, takes direct aim at ‘global design idioms’ and import culture. Their decision to use no glass at all, like their decision to situate circulation exclusively outdoors, seems radical at first but fits a climatic response that makes sense for a summer house in Corfu.
Working with local stonemasons, Groupwork’s Stone Demonstrator proofs a structural system that allows for pre-tensioned raw stone in denser urban environments, using blocks that can be salvaged and used again.
Amateur Architect Studio, curator of the forthcoming Venice Biennale, has long established its practice in the revival and preservation of local building knowledge, such as in reviving the regional wa pan masonry technique on its widely admired Ningbo Museum, built using ruins of villages demolished around the Chinese city of Ningbo during its rapid urban expansion.
It is possible, and probably more interesting, to put aside the low-carbon discourse, and instead look at design through the chain of relationships with nature, people and locale. It is not too distant a concept that these supply chains and footprints embody the work of positive and life-giving activity, too.
Investment of time and money needs direction. The enduring mechanisms we set into action now in the name of decarbonisation, namely how we manage land and nature, are imminent and decisive.
Wildlife conservationist and artist Peter Beard was known for citing the line ‘They make a desert, and they call it peace’. Originally an anti-imperialist sentiment written by Tacitus in 98BC, this poignant statement still proves a welcome perspective for us today. A low-carbon future should also be a sustainable one, and currently this is not a given.