Thorbjørn Lønberg Petersen

Prevailing sustainability paradigms are important for assessing impact, guiding policymaking, and raising public awareness. Yet their rationalist logic drives a tendency toward a total quantification, which effectively reproduces culture-nature dichotomies and undermines situated practical efforts to engage with the relational and qualitative dimensions of how humans live with each other, with their buildings, and within the Earth’s ecosystems. With the loss these qualities in questions of architectural sustainability, the changes that are urgently needed remain confined to material innovation, technical construction processes, and metric based assessment methodologies, decoupled from the everyday experiences of practitioners and inhabitants. This underscores the urgency of widening the scope of sustainability engagement to include how practitioners and inhabitants alike might care better for their environments. 

The study investigates alternative approaches to sustainability in architectural practice, asking how qualitative and relational perspectives can complement prevailing approaches based on technical solutions and measurable performance. Drawing on care ethics, the research understands sustainable architecture as an ongoing practice of attending and responding to the particular qualities, needs, and relationships embedded in everyday environments. From this perspective, sustainability is not only concerned with reducing environmental impacts, but also with how architecture is developed, made, maintained, adapted, and inhabited over time.

The study finds that integrating relational and metric-based perspectives involves tensions and contradictions, but also creates opportunities for more responsive and ecologically attentive forms of architectural practice. It argues that greater responsiveness between architecture, practitioners, inhabitants, and their environments can broaden how sustainability is understood and practiced.