What is Regenerative Architecture - and why does it matter
What is Regenerative Architecture?
Last year we joined the first ever Regenerative Architecture Index, launched by Architecture Today and Architects Declare, to benchmark architects’ progress towards regenerative practice.
The index recognises the need for a built environment that doesn’t just reduce negative impacts, but actively creates positive impacts for today and the long term. This is an approach we’ve embedded at Studio Bark since our beginnings in 2014 - looking beyond “less bad” to improve places for people and nature.
Regenerative design is about restoring land, habitats, and ecosystems to be better than when we found them. While sustainability focuses on reducing harm, regenerative architecture involves a broader shift of outlook that reconnects people with nature to create long-lasting benefits.
The Regenerative Architecture Index defines regenerative design through three key topics:
- Being a good ancestor: This is about a shift in practice mindsets to consider truly long-term thinking. Our decisions today should consider seven generations ahead, ensuring adaptability and flexibility for the future. This requires innovative thought, as current models are rarely beneficial in the long term.
- Co-evolving with nature: This is about recognising that we are part of nature, within integral living systems, not separate from it. Our work should actively regenerate ecosystems by learning from and working with natural systems. This requires designing for circularity and encouraging closed-loop energy, material and water cycles.
- Creating a just space for people: This is about providing social connection, economic opportunity and wellbeing for all. Our design processes should foster a shared sense of stewardship where neighbourhoods can self-organise and build their resilience. This requires ethical, inclusive and participative approaches.
Regenerative Architecture in Practice
At Studio Bark, regenerative principles shape not just our projects, but also how we run the studio:
- Planet: Staying below the ecological ceiling
- People: Staying above the social foundation
- Influence: Pushing for positive change in our industry and beyond
- Wellbeing: Valuing respect, transparency and fairness
On projects, these principles translate into tangible methods for creating truly regenerative architecture:
Regenerative From Day One
Truly regenerative design cannot be bolted on at later stages. From day one, we explore each site’s potential using drone scans, sketches, and 3D site models. We look at topography, sun paths, and orientation to optimise the design from the outset. This informs both the concept and the long-term environmental strategy, ensuring buy-in from clients and collaborators from the beginning.
Site-Specific Materials
We begin by mapping the materials around the site, looking at site-won materials or local by-products, or utilising local waste streams for example from quarries, reclamation yards, sawmills, and farms. We create a materials hierarchy, looking at reused, hyper-local, and natural materials. This stage also offers rich opportunities for collaborating with education or consultants, exploring innovative nature-based material solutions.
Landscape For Nature Recovery
Every site offers opportunities to regenerate nature. We bring ecologists and landscape architects into projects early, identifying areas of nature recovery as well as base line studies including trees, habitats, soil condition, and species. On rural sites we aim for more than 10% biodiversity net gain, pushing this as far as the site allows.
Passive Heating and Cooling
Comfort is best achieved when the building works with the climate. We design for winter solar gain, summer shading, natural ventilation, and highly efficient building envelopes. This reduces reliance on active systems while improving resilience to changing weather patterns. Dynamic energy modelling helps us test different design scenarios and exceed current benchmarks.
Renewable Energy
On-site renewable generation, most commonly solar, is carefully tested and optimised for each site. Battery storage allows smooth running despite seasonal fluctuations, while grid connection offers pragmatic resilience - ensuring buildings can run efficiently and reliably all year round.
Water Strategy
Water conservation and supply is an often overlooked yet important aspect of regenerative design, both for efficiency and nature recovery. Our projects use a range of water management strategies, from efficient appliances in buildings, to rainwater harvesting, and ponds for cooling and biodiversity.
Whole Life Zero Carbon Design
We carry out embodied and operational carbon studies from early design stages, to ensure design choices align with our intentions for low carbon design.
Beyond Carbon?
While it’s important to think beyond carbon - looking at ecology, land use, social value and circularity - there’s still a way to go for our industry to consistently and rigorously address the whole life carbon impacts of our designs that mustn’t be overlooked.
Many practices lack the tools to measure and reduce carbon across all design stages. For our industry to meaningfully shift towards regenerative design, we must raise the industry baseline for carbon measurement and reporting, by sharing the tools and knowledge for carbon literacy to become the norm rather than the exception.
That’s why we created SmallCarbon - to make carbon measurement and reporting easy, affordable, and accurate for practices of all sizes.
Find out more about the tool and how you can use it on your live projects here.
Regenerative Projects
Breach House
Breach House is a Paragraph 84 environmental home in Leicestershire. The design for the family home is deeply tied to the prevalence of rivers, brooks, and drainage channels in the immediate surroundings.
The proposal is informed by detailed analysis of setting and landscape, bringing significant enhancement to an ecologically-degraded agricultural site. These measures achieve an exceptional biodiversity net gain of 60%+ while providing on-site carbon drawdown and natural flood water management.
The project looks at how the site and building can reduce agricultural-chemical pollution in local water through a water tower and on site planting and management.
Explore Project
Nest House
Nest House is a single storey accessible home, designed to cater to the client’s long term physical needs, while accomplishing a low carbon footprint. It was constructed using Studio Bark’s modular and demountable U-Build system, having a light footprint on the land and maximising views of the surrounding countryside.
The fully accessible home is free of concrete and steel and instead uses reclaimed timber foundations, and timber roof and floor beams designed by U-Build and Structure Workshop. These design decisions, alongside many others, have created a ‘circular‘ home which is fully demountable at the end of its useful life.
The home was built by students in the summer of 2021 as part of Studio Bark’s No Building As Usual education programme. The programme is designed to address diversity and climate literacy in built environment education by giving students on-site experience of projects.
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Thatch House
Thatch House is a family home inspired by the traditional thatch houses of Dorset. As guardians of the beautiful site in rural Dorset, the client aspired to create a home using only local materials where possible.
The home is rooted in low energy design that surpasses all the current RIBA benchmarks by a significant margin. Extensive analysis was undertaken of both embodied and operational carbon to ensure that the home limits its carbon impact over its life cycle. The study concluded that the home would achieve Whole Life Zero Carbon within approximately 47 years.
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For Architects - Start Your Regenerative Design Journey
We want to see regenerative design becoming the norm across our industry. It’s not about one practice gate-keeping the tools and knowledge, but about working collaboratively to raise the bar across the board.
That’s why we created SmallCarbon, to make carbon decision-making and reporting easier, more affordable, and more accurate for all practices, no matter the scale of project or prior knowledge.
Find out more about SmallCarbon here.
We also encourage practices to explore Architecture Today’s Regenerative Architecture Index, learning from other practices and contributing ideas.
Find out more about the Regenerative Design Index here.
For Homeowners - Start Your Regenerative Project
If you dream of creating a regenerative home but aren’t sure where to begin, our team can help you combine your ideas with regenerative values. Whether you have just some initial sketches or have already explored planning routes, we’ll work with you to uncover the potential of your site.
We love collaborating with people who share our passion for beautiful, sustainable architecture. Let’s turn your vision into a home that’s restorative, low-carbon, and designed for the long term.
Get started today. Speak to us on +44 (0) 207 9934 332 or email info@studiobark.co.uk.
Glossary
Regenerative
Design that restores, renews, or improves ecosystems, communities, and materials beyond just reducing harm.
Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)
A measurable improvement in local biodiversity as a result of development or design interventions.
Passive Heating/ Cooling
Techniques that naturally regulate building temperature without active mechanical systems.
Building Services
Systems that make a building functional: heating, cooling, plumbing, electricity, and ventilation.
Whole Life Carbon
The total carbon emissions from a building over its full lifecycle, including construction, operation, and demolition.
Carbon Drawdown
The process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide through design, planting, or material choice.
Energy Modelling
Simulating a building’s energy use to optimise efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.
Social Value
The positive impacts a building or project has on people, communities, and wellbeing.
Circularity
Designing systems and materials so they can be reused, recycled, or returned to nature at the end of their life.
Ecology
The relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their environment.
