Exploring synergies in sustainable, resilient and smart buildings to address new design paradigms in the next generation of architecture

The accomplishment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) by 2030 will be largely influenced by the effectiveness level of planning, design, building and management stages in the next years (United Nations, 2015b). Since the late 1990s, buildings began to be designed according to more sustainable principles and this growth is also driven by the much more demanding current standard; however, due to the current impact of climate change (CC), this is no longer sufficient. At the same time, during the last decade, resilience has assumed an increasingly important role in design to ensure longevity, withstand the extreme weather brought on by CC, and reduce environmental impacts. The fact that sustainability has been considered more than resilience indicates the necessity to pay closer attention to the latter to reduce building vulnerability rather than responding reactively to a disruptive event. Smart technologies, which rapidly grow with the expansion of the information and communication technology (ICT) domain in the building sector, may reduce energy demands and respond to users’ needs while improving the performance of the building as a whole. The potential intersection of these design domains may reveal synergies, gaps or potentialities at an early stage of the design process for a new generation of buildings clearly aligned with the SDGs.