Re-structuring practice for sustainability: Learning from case studies

One of the biggest challenges in professional education today is to re-structure paradigms of practice to achieve higher-performing buildings and more livable communities. While great progress is being made in building performance research, there is often a great gap between research and practice. This paper is based on the idea that the typical highly resource-consuming development widely practiced today is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is an ineffective design process. To create sustainable buildings or communities, students and practitioners need a better model for incorporating empirical information into design. Three case studies in sustainable design can offer insights into the kind of design process needed to turn theories of sustainability into reality