Around the World, These Building Solutions Keep Things Local

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.

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-, a