about the author

Sofie Pelsmakers is a chartered architect and environmental designer with more than a decade of hands-on experience designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture. She taught sustainability and environmental design and led a masters programme in sustainable design at the University of East London. She is currently a lecturer in environmental design at the Sheffield School of Architecture and leads the MSc Sustainable Architecture Studies (2016). She is also finishing her doctoral research at the Bartlett Faculty of the built environment (UCL Energy Institute) and is co-founder of Architecture for Change, a not-for-profit environmental building organisation. in 2016 she joined ECD Architects (part-time) as Head of Research - read more about it here.

In this pocketbook, her practical and academic expertise are synthesised together with her passion and commitment to change and challenge the way we currently design and build. Its focus is on providing practical advice to deliver buildings that quietly mitigate and adapt to climate change using sustainable resources. 

The fast pace of change and the complexity and variety of technical solutions has at times mired the decision-making process in a confusing range of information and choice. This pocketbook is an attempt to cut through that confusion, synthesising the main issues into one single source of practical information. It is written especially with the building industry’s key players in mind – architects, designers, clients, contractors, developers and students – in the hope that they can confidently practise what the author refers to not as ‘sustainable’ architecture but simply as ‘good’ architecture.


Sofie is currently co-authoring a book with Judit Kimpian and Hattie Hartman on building energy performance for real, due in 2016.