In an industry where small practices often face unique challenges in sustainability, Steffen Welsch Architects has emerged as a leader, winning the Small Sustainable Practice Award at the 2024 Sustainability Awards.

The practice's Director, Steffen Welsch, speaks to Architecture & Design's Clémence Carayol about their innovative strategies, the power of continuous learning, and their commitment to designing residential projects that embody sustainability in action.

Architecture & Design: Why do you think you were honoured for your entry?

Steffen Welsch: This is difficult for us to say, but we feel that our integrated and measurable approach to sustainability, coupled with our emphasis on continuous learning and development, might have played a part in capturing the judges' attention.

As a firm primarily delivering custom, single-dwelling residential projects, we occupy a space in architecture that we believe doesn’t receive as much attention. For example, Green Star Homes is tailored to volume builders, NABERS doesn’t provide ratings for single-dwelling residential buildings, and the Living Building Challenge is often too resource- and time-intensive of an undertaking.

Despite these challenges, we have developed and are continuing to refine sustainability measures that work for us. These include the strategic use of passive solar design, reducing environmental impact through material selection, conducting post-construction evaluations, creating biodiversity plans, and more recently, adopting life cycle assessments (LCAs). All of this is supported by ongoing staff training and our commitment to sharing insights and education with clients, ensuring that sustainability is embraced as a shared and continuous journey.

I would also like to take the time and make space in this response to highlight the work of Heliotope, Jessica Hardwick Architecture, Supermanoeuver, and all the other small sustainable practices that are participating in this collective journey to design and build consciously. It’s not always easy to evolve, especially for smaller teams with limited resources. But this recognition celebrates the effort it takes to keep moving, to rethink old patterns, and to seek new ways to make an impact. Sustainability is a challenge, but for us, it’s also a commitment to the future.

We hope this awards category inspires others as much as it has inspired us to continue reflecting on our practices and to work towards extending our environmental handprint. By fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement, we’ve shown that even small steps can lead to significant progress—and we believe that’s what we were honoured for.

What did your entry add to the body of knowledge of sustainable design?

Whole-life carbon accounting is not a new concept in sustainability discourse, but its practical implementation, particularly for smaller residential projects, remains fairly elusive across the industry. This is reflected in the Architecture Climate Futures survey, where only 25.6% of participating practitioners reported confidence in applying Whole Life Cycle Assessments, compared to the 86.2% who felt confident in passive design principles.

For us, conducting an LCA for a small-scale project alongside our ESD consultant became an exercise in learning and innovation. Together, we navigated the unknowns - refining workflows, estimating costs, and assessing and interpreting outcomes. This effort not only helped us implement this methodology for our typology but we believe also contributed to advancing industry knowledge and LCA-conducting capacity - a step towards making LCAs more accessible for others in the future.

By getting others onboard with conducting LCAs - particularly smaller practices - we hope to raise more awareness amongst clients on the topics of operational and embodied carbon as a collective and ultimately inspire the uptake of more ambitious measures of climate action. Although we acknowledge that whole-life carbon accounting data and outcomes are averaged and estimated, and that there is certainly a need for more standardisation, we believe that this is potentially a powerful tool to be leveraged for taking the environmental costs of a building into consideration, alongside monetary cost.

Has your entry influenced the way you will design buildings in the future?

While we already use our Sustainable Action Plan (SAP) for thinking about and embedding environmental strategies into our practice, preparing this submission offered us another valuable opportunity to assess our ESD approach, critically review the underlying assumptions of certificate systems, and reflect on the ways in which our design recommendations can influence behaviour and more sustainability conscious living. Time for introspection is a crucial component of our growth - it encourages us to push our boundaries.

Awards programs like the Sustainable Building Awards play a significant role in advancing climate action by shaping perceptions of what constitutes good design. They inspire us to continuously elevate our standards by showcasing emerging methodologies and recognising the efforts of practices working to overcome sustainability challenges.

Seeing what others are achieving is both motivating and instructive, reinforcing our commitment to building better. In this way, Architecture and Design’s Sustainable Building Awards drive innovation and foster a collective commitment to reducing the built environment’s impact on the planet.

This category is sponsored by Knauf.

Image: Steffen Welsch Architects / Supplied

Clémence Carayol

Let’s connect!