ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how socio-technical connections both facilitate and hinder innovation in sustainable building construction. It is also quite evident that sustainability in construction has surfaced as a highly pressing and challenging global topic for policy intervention. The chapter focuses on the key devices implicated in developing building design concepts, notably the transition during the years 2010–2012, going from an ordinary functional campus building to an innovative sustainability concept based on extensive use of massive wood and natural ventilation. It shows how this design concept went through further negotiations and transformations to become a zero-emission building construction, operations, materials. The chapter engages with the topic of innovation from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective and positions the study vis-a-vis the normative literatures on sustainability in construction. Due to its socio-technical perspective and symmetrical emphasis on human and non-human actors and their complex interactions, the ANT approach appears to be particularly useful when studying innovation in sustainable building construction.
