Tracing the Evolution of Sustainable Architecture: An Analysis Spanning Five Decades

Abstract

This study aims to reveal the relationship between architecture and sustainability in the approximately half-century history of sustainability. The study reveals bibliographic characteristics such as change, trend, period, country and author in the terminology of sustainable architecture. A systematic literature review was carried out using bibliometric analysis to produce a performance analysis and science mapping of scientific studies in the field. Bibliometric network visualisations were created using VOSviewer software to analyse the conceptual, social and intellectual structure of the field. This study contributes to the literature by deciphering the bibliographic parameters of sustainable architecture studies conducted between 1975 and 2022. It also identifies current trends in the field and provides a chronological perspective on scholarly studies based on environmentally conscious architectural approaches. The scope of the study is limited to sustainable architecture studies in the Web of Science database, taking into account the range of resources and the speed of indexing. The studies were carried out using 15 keywords, which were predetermined for the scope and focus of the research. This study has enabled real and legal researchers to follow the developments and current course in the field. The broad temporal scope of this study, with its unique combination of research and potential to inform practice, underlines its contribution to the discourse on sustainable architecture and firmly establishes its rightful place. The analysis shows that research has gained momentum in recent years. Today, concepts such as sustainable architecture, climate change, sociocultural sustainability and reuse have come to the fore.

Keywords

• Sustainability
• Climate change
• Socio-cultural sustainability
• Reuse
• Bibliometric analysis