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That variety matters: a design ambition, a material choice and measured building performance are not interchangeable evidence of sustainability. The projects below are best read as examples of different approaches, with their completion status and claims kept in view.
What “best” means in this 2021 selection
New Atlas published the roundup on December 21, 2021, as an editorial survey of projects it considered interesting and innovative. It was not a global award, a comprehensive catalogue or a head-to-head sustainability assessment. The article itself acknowledged that a stricter list might emphasize existing buildings and energy-efficient renovations, but broadened its scope to include varied building types and strategies.
The projects do not share a common lifecycle assessment, performance measure or system boundary in the roundup. Some are completed buildings, while others were plans, research projects or design concepts. Accordingly, a project’s stated intention—such as reducing concrete or designing for disassembly—should not be mistaken for a verified whole-life carbon result.
#1 Best Overall
Standout projects and the strategies they represent
The summaries below reflect the roundup’s framing. They identify the design approach, not a comparative verdict about which project performed best.
Sara Cultural Centre, Skellefteå, Sweden
Designed by White Arkitekter, Sara Cultural Centre is a completed cultural venue and hotel. The European Commission lists its area at approximately 30,000 m² and identifies cross-laminated timber, glue-laminated timber and steel among its materials: European Commission project record.
White Arkitekter describes the 75-metre building as designed to be carbon-negative over 50 years. The firm says its carbon sequestration exceeds twice the emissions it attributes to operational energy and to material production, transport and on-site construction. Those figures and the projection are the architect’s claims, not independently verified comparative results. White Arkitekter also states a design life of at least 100 years; that is a design-life claim, not a guarantee of actual service life. See the firm’s 2021 opening announcement.
Rank #2
Floating Office Rotterdam, Netherlands
The office was presented as a building designed to rise and fall with tides, an approach suited to a changing water level. Solar power and recyclability at the end of its life were also part of its stated sustainability strategy. Those features describe the project’s design intent; the roundup supplies no common performance data for comparison with the other entries.
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TECLA is a dwelling 3D-printed by WASP and Mario Cucinella Architects using local raw earth. It puts a locally available material and digital fabrication at the centre of the construction approach. The roundup does not establish a comparable lifecycle assessment or operational-energy result for the dwelling.
HiLo, Switzerland
HiLo is a research building whose structural approach was intended to reduce concrete use. It represents a research-led attempt to rethink structural material demand, rather than evidence in this roundup of a completed, quantified whole-building carbon reduction.
Nodi, Sweden
Nodi is a mixed-use timber office building designed by White Arkitekter. Its inclusion broadened the selection’s timber examples beyond a cultural venue to a workplace. The roundup does not provide a shared set of carbon or operational-energy figures for evaluating it against Sara.
Casamia Community House, Vietnam
This community building uses a bamboo frame and was designed with durability and severe weather in mind. The project brings material choice together with resilience: the usefulness of a renewable structural material depends in part on whether the building can serve its purpose over time and in local conditions.
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Seventy-Six, New York
Seventy-Six was a planned mixed-use net-zero development. Its status is important: a plan or target is not proof of completed net-zero operation. The roundup presents it as an intended development, not as a building with measured performance.
Rank #4
Stadium 974, Qatar
Stadium 974 was presented as a demountable stadium made with nearly 1,000 shipping containers. The strategy was to make the venue capable of being dismantled and to reduce waste associated with a major event. Demountability can support reuse, but by itself does not establish what happened to every component or the project’s total environmental impact.
Timber restaurant, London
The restaurant design used lightweight engineered wood for a constrained site. Its other stated features included solar power, a green roof and wildlife nesting boxes. These combine a structural material strategy with energy and habitat measures, though the roundup gives no common metrics to quantify their effects.
Xuhui Runway Park, Shanghai
Xuhui Runway Park turned a disused airport runway into public space while retaining elements of the former airport. The project was described as using recycled materials and rainwater collection. Rather than replacing the site wholesale, it demonstrates how reuse can include existing infrastructure as well as materials.
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How to compare the projects without flattening their differences
A useful comparison starts with the same questions for every building, while recognizing that the roundup does not answer all of them for each project.
- Use and setting: What is the building for, and what climate, site constraints or hazards shape its design?
- Status: Is it completed, under construction, a research project or proposed? Treat targets for a planned building differently from results in an occupied one.
- Materials and lifespan: What materials are used, where do they come from, how durable are they, and can the building or its parts adapt to future needs?
- Whole-life impacts: Are embodied carbon and operational energy both reported? Check the dates, system boundaries and whether figures are measured, modeled or projected before comparing them.
- Reuse and disassembly: Does the project retain an existing structure or site, enable components to be reused, or make disassembly possible? A design for reuse is not the same as documented reuse.
- Public and ecological value: Does the project provide public space, community facilities, habitat or resilience benefits, and how are those outcomes evidenced?
On this basis, the roundup is most useful as a map of approaches—timber construction, local earth, bamboo, structural research, climate adaptation, disassembly and public-space reuse—rather than as evidence that one project was objectively the most sustainable.
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