Practicing Architecture with Care: An Investigation into Architectural Strategies and Environmental Perspective Beyond Metrics

The urgency of the ecological crisis and the increasing impact of the built environment call for radical change: both in prevailing sustainability practices and in developing more relationally embedded ways of working toward stable ecological coexistence.
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.
This study therefore aims to uncover qualitative and relational engagements by investigating three architectural practices that each demonstrate alternative approaches to sustainability in housing: Reværk, Leth & Gori, and Local. The research asks how their engagement may inform broader architectural practice and contribute to widening prevailing modes of sustainability in architecture. The aim is not to reject current paradigms, but to complement them by highlighting their blind spots while offering alternative, careful approaches.
To achieve this, the study assumes a contextual, relational, and practice-oriented perspective informed by care ethics, understanding both practitioners and environments as actors within caring relationships. Care is here understood as the everyday practices through which humans maintain and repair their world, so that it can sustain life as well as possible. Drawing on Joan Tronto’s definition of care as a practice, and her framework of the ideal caring process, the project investigates sustainable architectural practice not as about imposing technical solutions, but as an engagement that attends to the unique qualities and relations embedded in everyday settings. By being attentive and responsive, a care-ethical approach asks which situated actions are adequate before relying on universal principles and abstract metrics. Accordingly, through the lens of care, sustainable architecture becomes less about creating finalized outcomes and meeting reduction targets, and more about the practices before and after the point of architectural realization.
The study finds that care-oriented sustainable engagement is contingent on how each practice reconciles the opposing positions of metric-based and relationally embedded perspectives on sustainability. While some insights resonate with current practices of design and inhabitation, the investigation also shows that a truly relational turn requires more radical reforms of how architecture is practiced, developed, and inhabited. The case studies reveal that efforts to bridge opposing ontologies may manifest in paradoxes and contradictions, but that conscious attention to these tensions can lead to more care-oriented environments. Most centrally, the study highlights the critical importance of responsiveness among architecture, practitioners, and inhabitants. Through increased responsiveness, the making and inhabitation of architecture can serve as a medium through which humans regain a more ecologically attuned perspective on the world, understanding care not as a burden but as a source of enhanced living quality.