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Building of the month

Building of the Month is C20’s longest running editorial feature – 21 years and counting. In the archive below, you’ll discover over 250 entries spanning more than 30 countries.

Each month we highlight a building of our period, in the UK or internationally, that we think deserves attention. As well as featuring well-known examples, it has become an invaluable platform to document and ultimately help save many lesser-known, yet equally remarkable, twentieth century buildings. In the archive below, you’ll discover over 250 entries spanning more than 30 countries.

2023: Climate and Sustainability

Throughout 2023, the Building of the Month feature will focus on a selection of Twentieth Century buildings from across the globe that were designed with climate and sustainability at the forefront. Given the seriousness with which the climate crisis is unfolding around us, we have decided to use this column to highlight those buildings which have made a conscious and active decision to reduce their reliance on new materials and on mechanical heating and cooling. Instead they prioritise a careful and considerate dialogue between the building and the natural environment. As the need to lessen the carbon footprint of the built environment is made abundantly clear, we explore a collection of buildings that offer a diverse range of responses to this problem, but all with a similar ambition – to reduce the burden of architecture on the planet, and to provide a more passive and sustainable relationship with their immediate climate and context.

As our president Cath Slessor has written “Buildings account for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are rapacious consumers of resources and energy, yet too often sustainability is seen by architects and clients as just another box to tick.” This series of BOTM sets out to celebrate those architects and buildings who saw sustainability and engagement with the environment as an opportunity – as a responsibility – and not just a requirement. The buildings selected vary greatly in their approaches – from simple passive solar buildings, those with an interest in self-sufficiency and the use of recycled materials, to buildings that were at the vanguard of sustainable technologies. But in their variety, they demonstrate that an environmental consciousness is not a new thing for the architectural profession. Rather, it has been a preoccupation for a very long time.