Sustainable architecture means making the most of what a site already offers — sun, wind, ground, local materials — while doing as little damage to it as possible. The technical term is minimising environmental impact. In practice it comes down to a handful of decisions taken at the drawing-board stage, while they are still cheap to make. If you are weighing up a project on the Costa del Sol, it is worth raising the subject early with your architecture practice in Málaga.
The European Union has been pushing sustainable buildings hard, and it puts real weight on building sustainability certificates. The reason is blunt: construction consumes 40% of all the energy we use.
It also produces 35% of greenhouse gas emissions, which makes it one of the biggest contributors to climate change. That is why decarbonisation protocols take the sector so seriously. Cut energy use, bring renewables into construction, and Europe meets its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.
In Spain, the national and European frameworks have already made this compulsory rather than aspirational. Since 31 December 2020, every new building must be a nearly zero-energy building (NZEB — in Spanish, edificio de consumo de energía casi nulo). The public sector got there first: the requirement applied from 31 December 2018 to new buildings owned or occupied by the public administration. Worth knowing if you are arriving from the UK: this sits in the Código Técnico de la Edificación, Spain’s building regulations. The architect is the one who signs to say the project complies. It is not guidance you can politely ignore.
Sustainable architecture: basic principles and examples
It helps to start with what actually makes a building sustainable, rather than with what makes it look sustainable in a brochure.
The basic principles of sustainable building
To deserve the name, a sustainable building has to meet a short list of essential principles:
- It responds to the specific climate of the place where it is built. The design that works in Asturias is not the design that works in Torremolinos.
- It gets the most out of its materials — how efficiently they are used, and how well they perform.
- It uses markedly less energy than conventional construction.
- It meets a baseline of comfort that is not up for negotiation. A house nobody wants to sit in is not sustainable; it is merely empty.
On top of that, sustainable architecture has to obey three golden rules:
- No renewable energy should be consumed faster than it is generated.
- No pollutant should be produced faster than the environment can recycle, neutralise or absorb it.
- No non-renewable resource should be used faster than a sustainably used renewable substitute can be put in its place.
Examples of sustainable homes
Examples are multiplying across Spain, driven by the regulations and by a broad concern about the climate.
At Klic we work on sustainable projects across every building type. Detached family homes are the obvious case, with the work running from the initial design through to planning and project management.
These houses are turning up all over the country. Geodesic homes in Murcia, built around bioclimatic strategies so the house largely looks after itself. Houses glazed with high-performance glass for thermal insulation. Modular prefabricated houses — one in Asturias went up in barely five hours.
Near-zero energy consumption has been achieved in Catalonia too, in homes assembled from modules. There, the gaps between the modules work as solar collectors and as shaded, cooler terraces.
Natural materials, renewable energy and clever detailing that squeezes the most out of every kilowatt: that is what these houses have in common.
On the Costa del Sol the priorities shift, and this is where buyers from northern Europe tend to get caught out. Arriving from the UK, most people think first about insulation and heating. Here the decisions that matter are orientation, shading and cross-ventilation. Get those right and the mechanical kit you need shrinks. Get them wrong and no amount of equipment will rescue a west-facing wall of glass in August.
Sustainable architecture is not the future. It is the present, and the regulations already say so. A sustainable house today means comfort and efficiency in step with its surroundings, which is a decent return on decisions that cost little to take early. If you are planning a new build or a refurbishment down here, take the energy decisions at the start of the project, not at the end.
