Architecture’s Road to Sustainable Innovation

Reaching for Change, in Teaching and Practice

Abstract

Current practice in the building industry is not sustainable. The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals define a key set of the global challenges and targets that the world must move significantly towards to address the sustainability emergency. Architectural solutions, products and services contributing to the Goals are already there, in smaller scale. However, the bulk of the built environment is part of im-mense current challenges – the building industry is a major consumer of energy and natural resources, and a prolific producer of waste. To create new sustainable practice, we need to understand why new architectural solutions, products and services struggle to become market dominant. And we need to teach a new generation of architects and building professionals how to engage in, develop, sustain and promote emerging sustainable practices not yet formed. In this article we discuss findings from seven case studies to argue that dynamic capabilities are required for sustainable innovation to succeed. Rather than simply following established practise, navigating in emergent sustainable markets requires finding and forming new practise, which in turn make the ability to work freely among knowledge domains an essential capability in future professionals. This points to an educational potential in working with open-ended project- and problem-specific assignments to build the capabilities needed to reach sustainable change.