1. Anupama Kundoo – India’s Anupama Kundoo blends traditional Indian techniques with radical innovation. Her work in Auroville, including the “Wall House” and lightweight ferrocement structures, proves that low-tech can be high impact. Her philosophy centers around local materials, self-sufficiency, and zero waste, offering a path to sustainable urbanism rooted in community and place.

“My buildings grow out of the place. The idea is to make architecture a catalyst for social change,” says Kundoo.

2. AMUNT – Germany Winners of the AR Emerging Architecture Award, this German studio creates emotionally rich, low-carbon homes using passive design and recycled materials. Their JustK House shows how eco-housing can be beautiful, efficient, and emotionally sustainable, with hand-crafted timber and thoughtful details woven into every inch.

3. Alejandro Aravena / ELEMENTAL – Chile Pritzker Prize-winner Aravena leads ELEMENTAL, a public interest architecture studio famous for its incremental housing: homes that families can build onto as resources grow. These projects are affordable, expandable, and community-based—an essential counterpoint to the high-gloss, high-cost world of global architecture.

4. Patkau Architects, based in Vancouver, is known for their minimalist approach to eco-design, seamlessly blending architecture with the natural environment. They use innovative materials and sustainable techniques in a way that creates spaces that are at once functional and awe-inspiring.

Their projects, such as the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, showcase how sustainable design can elevate community engagement while respecting the natural surroundings.

Bjarke Ingels is the founder of BIG, a renowned architectural firm based in Copenhagen. His approach to architecture blends bold, forward-thinking design with sustainability and social impact. BIG is known for creating structures that balance aesthetics with environmental and social responsibility.

Their iconic projects like the Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant in Copenhagen, which doubles as a ski slope, and the 8 House, a mixed-use development focused on sustainable urban living, show how architecture can address climate challenges while being playful and functional. Ingels’ work embraces the idea of “hedonistic sustainability,” where green solutions are not only efficient but enjoyable. His website reads: BIG.dk, so you figure out where he’s going with this.

Green Prophet readers know that architecture isn’t just about buildings—it’s about systems, ethics, materials, and how we relate to the planet.

Curious about eco-architecture in the Middle East?

? Read about desert-smart Nubian vaults in Egypt

? Or the zero-energy oasis by Tamer El-Sawy that rethinks how we live with heat and scarcity.

The post 5 Brilliant eco-architect alternatives to Foster + Partners appeared first on Green Prophet.

“Regenerative design, as a philosophy and practice, aims not merely to limit the damage we cause to the environment but to restore natural systems.”

Academics from the University of Bath have issued a new resource on the potential for regenerative design to deliver net-positive benefits, as well as actionable principles for change. RENEW: a manifesto for regenerative design and engineering is a 35-page electronic guidebook developed by the university’s Centre for Regenerative Design & Engineering for a Net Positive World (known as RENEW).

The RENEW center takes a cross-disciplinary approach to developing systems for the built environment that harmonize benefits to society with the natural world.

RENEW combines expertise from more than 40 academics, researchers, and industry stakeholders in water and chemical engineering, materials and composites, and placemaking and architecture with social science, economic, governance, and ecological studies.

Regenerative > Sustainable?

Technology, science, and education have long focused on improving the human experience—such as by extending life expectancy worldwide—and evolving the spaces where we live, work, and play, but have done so through “extractive, non-regenerative practices,” said RENEW members in the manifesto.

Sustainability has been championed for four decades to manage and minimize damage to the Earth’s resources but has been slow to penetrate the industrialized world. The guidebook’s authors note that contemporary net-zero emissions efforts and global climate target policies do not prescribe a way forward for “human systems to contribute positively to natural systems.”

In order to adequately mitigate the impacts of climate change, improve biodiversity, and rebalance social inequities, the RENEW manifesto authors indicate that society requires an evolution from resource exploitation to a framework that prioritizes restoration of the global ecosystem.

In an announcement launching the RENEW guidebook, center director and professor Sukumar Natarajan said that the initiative is designed to provide guiding principles for engineering, architecture, and other disciplines that enable society to “create resilient, fair communities that can thrive in balance with nature, while improving standards of living.”

Related: Habitat is the Bible for Regenerative Architecture

Six Principles of Regenerative Design

The RENEW manifesto lays out six guiding principles of regenerative design, then offers a framework for putting them into practice. The six principles include:

1. Reflective governance—Establish continuously evolving metrics and monitoring practices to track progress and impact.
2. Embrace interconnectivity—Recognize that the world is intricate and interdependent. Take a holistic view accounting for the dynamic relationships between ecosystems and communities.
3. Work as nature—Work harmoniously with and as nature. Design systems that work as part of species and ecosystem patterns, processes, and cycles.
4. Prioritize net positive—Prioritize regeneration, replenishment, and restoration, recovering and reusing waste to create net-positive solutions and an abundance of resources. The aim should be to repair, sustain, and enrich the planet, rather than deplete its precious resources.
5. Cultivate resilience—Systems should be designed with a capacity to adapt, diversify, and self-renew even in the face of uncertainty, change, and disturbances.
6. Transmit—Document, curate, and publicize to help proliferate best practice through active discourse on a global scale.

The authors concluded that the guide is intended as a foundation for continuously evolving this multidisciplinary approach to solving building/engineering problems.

Center co-director Emma Emanuelsson observed that “We want this manifesto to help create a less anxious future for today’s young people, and for humans and nature to prosper in equal measure. It may not show us the full journey, but it does have advice and a framework to allow us to get started.”

For the full guidance, readers can download RENEW: a manifesto for regenerative design and engineering  here – links to PDF.

The post What is regenerative design? A UK crew develops a future-thinking handbook appeared first on Green Prophet.