Architype

Behind business-as-usual and 2024’s day-to-day comforts and convenience is the broader backdrop of the cascading climate crisis, growing energy poverty, and resource scarcity on a world being pushed further and further beyond its safe operating space. Earth experienced its hottest day ever recorded on July the 22^nd 2024, and every fraction of a degree of global heating counts more than we can comprehend – injecting evermore energy into the planet’s intensifying climate and weather systems: raising sea levels, redrawing coastlines, and threatening coastal and island communities; intensifying extreme weather events, flooding, heatwaves and wildfires; and applying further pressure to civilisational infrastructure and food systems. 

Returning and remaining below the 1.5°C limit established in the Paris Agreement is unlikely – with the U.K. and EU-27 construction sectors on course to burn through their allocated fair share of carbon budgets in 2026. Climate scientists stress that the climate impacts we have seen so far are only a hint of what is now possible, and by now we know well that settling for ‘sustainable’ or sustainability-as-usual fails to rise, or do justice, to the moment.

Architype believes in actions not words when it comes to the climate and biodiversity emergencies. This ethos has fuelled decades of leading from beyond the curve: realising high-performance architecture in use from natural materials, developing in-house building performance evaluation capabilities to verify this performance, optimising and learning from what we design, championing the Passivhaus standard – delivering more than 198 certified Passivhaus buildings, and supporting the development of transformative funding mechanisms with the Scottish Futures Trust – innovatively tying Energy Use Intensity targets to long-term funding. Over time, Architype’s co-owners defined our core mission and values as “creating ecologically progressive communities”, and in today’s context, that now means pushing beyond sustainable and into regenerative outcomes.

Regenerative design and its outcomes are place-based, and step beyond the long-established Brundtland Commission definition of ‘sustainable’ as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Instead, it embodies the intention of leaving things better than we found them, doing ecological and social good in the process – element of this being embodied in Architype’s realisation of the Enterprise Centre commended as a “beacon for the industry”, embracing place-based and climatic design, material specification, procurement, regeneration and sourcing in tandem with exemplar performance. By way of example, take our design of the Coed-y-Brenin Visitor Centre that sits lightly amongst the trees and was the first use of Brettstapel in Wales, using local timber. Architects Declare define regenerative design as “an approach in which human systems are designed to co-exist and co-evolve with natural systems over time”, and Architype believe that delivering upon this requires innovative collaboration, beyond siloed applications of design and technical skills alone, and that it yields exciting and robust possibilities for those we work with.

To this end, Architype are thrilled to announce the co-created role of the Regenerative Design and Infrastructures Specialist with Scott McAulay. Since joining Architype in 2021, he has worked cross-studio in a sustainability-coordination, materials-specialist and lifecycle-analysis capacity on EnerPHit Informed Retrofit Plans and new build projects. Scott has long been at the forefront of climate action and education in architecture, advocating for a Just Transition in the decarbonisation of the sector and society beyond it. 

This new role fuses providing project-specific and studio-wide strategic and day-to-day support alongside cultivating conducive infrastructures, such as conditions, processes, and approaches to empower our project teams and co-owners to deliver regenerative outcomes. Delivering outcomes has long been a cornerstone of Architype’s approach to architecture, facilitated by weaving together the extensive collective wisdom within Architype. Building our capacities for the cultural, ecological, and systemic transformations required to unlock regenerative possibilities for the Built Environment requires more radical and wider infrastructural approaches than traditional architectural and ‘sustainability’ processes as we know them – drawing connections across localities, projects and studios, identifying opportunities as they arise and making time to look for them. Developing the RDIS role is our answer to this.

Scott McAulay has coordinated the Anthropocene Architecture School project since 2019, being a Co-Producer of Scotland’s Architecture Fringe since 2021, and contributing to the activities of the Scottish Ecological Design Association and Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) Scotland; he was a coordinator of the ACAN Climate Literacy group between 2020 and 2022, a team leader during 2021’s School of Re-Construction and was part of co-creating Retrofit Reimagined 2023. 

Scott’s work at Architype has also included co-developing the practice’s Climate Action Roadmap, delivering early-stage carbon and circular economy workshops to clients, laying the groundwork for visionary sustainability aspirations, material strategies and targets – most recently for the Royal Agricultural University’s landscape-led Innovation Village. 

The integration of Passivhaus into our design workflows from 2009 and the subsequent iterative process of refining Architype’s approach to delivering outcomes has been a decade-long transformative step-up in its journey as an architecture studio renowned for award-winning, high-performance, low-impact architecture. Learning from our past work once-more and stepping beyond this to newly identified opportunities in circularity and more, will cultivate the conditions for realising regenerative outcomes across all of our projects in the next exciting chapter to the ‘Architype way’.

We are delighted to share that in the process of this blog being written that Scott has been shortlisted in the Built Environment Smart Transformation (BE-ST) 2024 Accelerate to Zero Hero Award! We would like to congratulate Scott on this huge achievement, the award “celebrates a stand out entrant who has made the most remarkable contribution to decarbonising the built environment. Whether an individual or an organisation, the winner embodies exceptional dedication and impact in driving sustainability, innovation and positive impact on the built environment and society“. The winner will be announced at the BE-ST Awards on the 7th of November.

Architype are strategically looking towards new opportunities that align with our core values and welcome your enquiry if you are interested in discussing how we could support and unlock the regenerative potential of your projects, existing buildings, or decarbonisation journey. For a free one-hour consultation with Scott and our Perform+ team about your challenges and opportunities, please contact: perform@architype.co.uk