Library
Ideas the practice is built on-
How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil
Core thesis
Modern civilization runs on four material pillars: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia. All four require fossil fuels not merely as energy but as feedstock. Energy transitions are generational (decades, not electoral cycles), and anyone who claims otherwise has not run the numbers on tonnage. The book is a quantitative literacy exercise: how much stuff does it actually take to keep 8 billion people alive?
What it unlocks in practice
Forces you to quantify before you specify. Every material choice on a drawing carries an embedded energy cost that Smil's numbers make legible: a cubic metre of concrete embodies roughly 100–300 kg CO₂; a tonne of steel ~1.8 t CO₂; a kilogram of ammonia-based fertiliser ~1.5 kg CO₂. The design move is to run Smil's "four pillars" audit on any project: how many tonnes of cement, steel, plastic, and synthetic nitrogen does this building or masterplan demand, and which of those demands can be displaced by genuinely lower-energy alternatives (bamboo, earth, biological nitrogen fixation) rather than merely shifted to another fossil input? This is the test CEB blocks and the Byproduct thesis have to pass.
Watch out for
Smil is a diagnostician, not a designer. His stance can calcify into "nothing works, so don't bother," which is useful for killing naivety but dangerous as a design posture. He systematically underweights the speed at which costs fall on new energy tech (solar PV cost curves have repeatedly outrun his projections). He also has little to say about demand reduction, sufficiency, or non-Western material traditions; bamboo, earth, and lime barely appear despite their demonstrated structural capacity in tropical contexts. The risk is using Smil to justify inaction rather than to sharpen action.
-
Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows, 2008
Stocks, flows, feedback and delays are a working grammar for everything the practice touches. Persistent problems are patterns generated by structure. The deep levers sit in who gets information and in what a system is actually for. Our buildings are designed as feedback instruments because of this book.
Core thesis
Problems persist because they are generated by structure. Behaviour emerges from stocks, flows, feedback loops, and delays. Intervene at symptoms and the structure routes around you. Lasting change means shifting information flows, rules, or goals.
What it unlocks in practice
Before any design response we identify the accumulating stock, trace dominant feedback loops, and locate where information is missing or delayed. On Gili Meno this meant mapping water, waste, and revenue as interdependent stocks. The masterplan’s phasing follows directly: which reinforcing loops activate first (mangrove biomass, guest confidence), which balancing loops kill momentum if ignored (regulatory lag, freshwater depletion). At Jugil TPST, BSF larvae populations are a stock with biological delays that dictate facility throughput. Design the buffer before the building.
Watch out for
The book can make you feel fluent in systems without ever quantifying one. Causal loop diagrams are easy to draw, hard to validate. "Shift the paradigm" is not an architectural instruction. If your systems thinking never produces a number or a falsifiable prediction, it’s philosophy cosplaying as method.
Project relevance
Gili Meno masterplan: phasing and infrastructure logic from stock-flow-feedback mapping. BiRD Lab: coupled feedback loops between pedagogy, food production, and building performance.
Cross-references
Taleb (Antifragile) on why optimising for efficiency destroys redundancy. Tsing (Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet) on reinforcing loops of extraction outrunning regeneration. Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution) on reducing intervention to shift loop dominance.
Threads
Buy
-
Design with Nature, Ian McHarg, 1969
Core thesis
Design is not a formal or aesthetic act. It is a decision about where and how humans intervene in living systems. McHarg’s method: map ecological processes layer by layer (geology, hydrology, soils, vegetation, wildlife, climate), overlay them, and let the composite reveal where development is appropriate, where it is risky, and where it is destructive. Nature is the primary designer. The architect’s job is editorial, not authorial.
What it unlocks in practice
Every site we work on begins with a suitability analysis derived from McHarg. On Gili Meno this was literal: coral sand geology, freshwater lens depth, mangrove root zones, tidal inundation, and prevailing wind mapped as constraints before a single building footprint was placed. The masterplan’s conservation zones are not ideological. They are overlay outputs. At Jugil, slope stability and downstream hydrology determined the TPST footprint and drainage design before programme was even confirmed. The method forces us to treat site selection and building placement as ecological decisions with measurable consequences, not client preferences dressed up in sustainability language.
Watch out for
McHarg’s overlay method assumes relatively stable ecological baselines. On a 1.5km coral island with rising sea levels and shifting sand profiles, “suitability” is a moving target. The binary logic of build/don’t-build also underestimates what light-touch, adaptive structures (elevated, demountable, bio-based) can achieve in marginal zones. And the book’s silence on power, capital, and land tenure means you still need a political theory to get anything built. Overlay analysis tells you where. It does not tell you how to negotiate with the landowner, the regulator, or the investor who wants the beachfront.
Project relevance
Gili Meno masterplan: ecological overlay as the foundational planning instrument, directly determining conservation zones, building envelopes, and infrastructure corridors. Jugil TPST: hydrological and geotechnical constraint mapping for facility siting. BiRD Lab: integrating building into existing vegetation, slope, and water flow rather than clearing and grading.
Cross-references
Meadows (Thinking in Systems) on why ecological processes are feedback structures, not static backdrops. Wahl (Designing Regenerative Cultures) on moving beyond “do less harm” to active participation in living systems. Tsing (Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet) on why no landscape is pristine baseline, complicating McHarg’s implied equilibrium.
-
Drawdown, Paul Hawken, 2017
A ranked inventory of what actually reverses warming with tools that already exist. The surprise is the order: food, land use and educating girls outrank energy. Climate reframed from apocalypse to design brief.
Threads
Buy
-
Build Beyond Zero, Bruce King and Chris Magwood, 2022
Net zero is an accounting trick if the fabric front-loaded decades of emissions before day one. King and Magwood make the engineering case for buildings as carbon storage, with straw, hemp, timber and earth as the vaults. It is the reference text for every module we build, and the book that lets a grown building hold its own in front of an engineer.
Threads
Buy
-
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Anna Tsing and others, 2017
Ghosts are the traces past damage leaves in a landscape; monsters are the multispecies entanglements we live inside either way. The essays train the eye to read a site as layered with other lives and prior harms, where a survey drawing shows a blank plane with a north arrow. Morton supplies the philosophy of entanglement. This collection supplies the fieldwork.
Threads
Buy
-
The Blue Economy, Gunter Pauli, 2010
Ecosystems run on cascades: the waste of one process is the feedstock of the next. Pauli's question for every output is blunt and useful: what eats this next? On a small island this is memory more than theory, because Gili Meno ran on exactly these cascades before tourism narrowed its economy to a single fragile stream. We treat the book as a pattern library and test each pattern before trusting it.
Threads
Buy
-
Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, 2018
A large share of modern work is jobs even their holders believe are pointless, and it damages people, because humans need their work to have effects in the world. It is an audit lens for our profession, which produces its share of reports nobody reads and renders that exist only to win the job. The book explains why this practice stays small, and why scope gets pruned like a Fukuoka field.
Buy
-
Designing Regenerative Cultures, Daniel Christian Wahl, 2016
Wahl treats sustainability as a floor and asks what sits above it. His question for every project is whether it increases the health and expressive capacity of the systems around it, from household to bioregion. This is the rigorous version of the vocabulary our practice trades in, and it is close to a framing text for the whole thing.
Threads
Buy
-
The One-Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka, 1975
Fukuoka spent forty years removing interventions from his farm and finished with yields that matched conventional fields. Do-nothing farming is a misnomer; the method is observation-heavy and intervention-light, and each subtraction had to earn its place over seasons. We seed into standing straw too; we just call it a wall.
Threads
Buy
-
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière, 1991
Jacotot taught students he shared no language with, and they learned; Rancière's conclusion is that explication is what makes students dependent. All intelligences are equal; what differs is attention and will. The pedagogical licence for metabolic architecture: a legible building poses problems without a teacher explaining them away.
Threads
Buy
-
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
The oldest argument for restraint in design: a room is useful because of its emptiness. Wu wei looks like passivity from the outside, and it takes more site knowledge to do less. You will find this book in our details before you find it in our copy.
Threads
-
The Green Imperative, Victor Papanek, 1995
Papanek insists there is no neutral drawing: every specification either adds ecological damage or reduces it. He asks for materials that separate cleanly at end of life, and he treats waste as a design flaw and a failure of the imagination.
Threads
Buy
-
Megathreats, Nouriel Roubini, 2022
Roubini catalogues shocks that no longer arrive one at a time: debt, climate, technology and demography now amplify one another. His blind spot is instructive. The solutions are assumed to come from the same nation-states and institutions he shows failing, and distributed resilience barely rates a mention. We read it as the case for working at this practice's scale, made by omission.
Threads
Buy
-
Humanitarian Architecture, Esther Charlesworth, 2014
Charlesworth studies architects working where the stakes are highest, after disasters. Her lesson is that the first shelter needs its upgrade path designed in from day one, or it hardens into a decade of substandard housing. The book is a strong argument for architecture as a service profession, and it keeps our ambitions honest.
Threads
Buy
-
Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, 2012
Some systems break under stress, and a rare class improves because of it. The barbell is the useful tool here: extreme caution on one side, bold experiments on the other. It is how the practice structures its ventures, and why the middle ground gets so little of our time.
Threads
Buy
-
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton, 2016
There is no outside to stand on; ecological design happens from inside the mesh. Morton is useful against purity fantasies. Moisture and microbes will arrive regardless of the drawings, so the details plan for coexistence and stay inspectable for the life of the building. Bamboo in the tropics is this book made physical.
Threads
Buy
