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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture

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Vol. 1

Letter from the Editor - 
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds - 
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function - 
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd - 
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia - 
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture - 
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture - 
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi - 
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? - 
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia- 
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model - 
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion - 
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism - 
Nolan Aucone

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CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E13

Planting the Illusion: 
Greenwashing and Sustainability 
in the Built Environment
Lauren Taravella



Over the past several decades, sustainability has emerged as a powerful visual language in architecture. Green spaces, foliage, rooftop parks, lush renderings, and green walls have increasingly populated architectural projects and proposals to portray environmental responsibility. However, the aesthetic of “green” often overrides the actual ecological performance of the architecture. As the climate crisis intensifies over time, sustainability has largely transformed into a branding tool: elevating image, attracting investment, and checking boxes. Through this strategic marketing tactic, sustainability as branding fails to fully engage with the true ecological implications of construction, material sourcing, and energy demands. Many high-profile projects market surface-level strategies that primarily benefit profit. Through an examination of core environmental problems, the hidden marketing of greenwashing and widely known architectural projects, it becomes clear how sustainability as branding operates as a tool to increase value, promote desirability, and attract buyers. When sustainability is an advertisement, architecture becomes complicit in producing illusions that mask carbon-intensive practices. Only by addressing the profit structures and hidden flows that sustain these illusions can architecture begin to approach true climate accountability. The built environment is widely known as one of the leading contributors of carbon emissions globally. Accounting for a staggering 40% of global carbon emissions, designers, planners, and builders must urgently have a comprehensive understanding of their climate implications as professionals. This percentage of carbon emissions derived from buildings are comprised of two major components: operational energy and embodied carbon.1  

Operational energy comes from electricity, heating, and cooling required through the life of a building; embodied carbon encompasses the cumulative carbon emissions associated with a building before it becomes operational, including raw material extraction, production, transportation, assembly, and construction processes. As urbanization and its demand for energy accelerate, the environmental issues in cities will continue to become more pressing. High performing buildings may have larger embodied carbon due to transportation of materials, extraction, and manufacturing required to build them to a higher standard. Concrete alone requires extensive labor to extract along with the usage of kilns that release massive amounts of carbon, and steel depends on mining and global shipping routes. Concrete and steel are, of course, two primary building materials that shapes almost all architecture today; before even considering superstructures, nearby all buildings today utilize some kind of reinforced concrete foundation system. Likewise, demolishing existing structures to make way for new higher performing structures frequently results in a significant net increase in emissions.2 Densifying urban developments with their large glass facades and reduced pervious surfaces naturally contributes to the urban heat island and biodiversity loss.

The severity of climate change challenges common goals of architecture: novelty, expansion, and growth. It demands instead new models of adaptation, durability, and accountability. The climate crisis is not exclusively an environmental issue; it is intertwined with how we build, source, and operate the built environment. As architects, we have a powerful position to make choices that can slow or even reverse harm to our planet.

The urgency of the climate crisis has resulted in a large demand for measurable environmental accountability in the built environment. Sustainability needed to be quantified and proven. In response to this, certification systems like, LEED, WELL, PassivHaus, and Green House emerged. These certifications became mechanisms to standardize environmental responsibility and to showcase accountability. However, as these certification systems grew in complexity and bureaucracy, the reality became about passing checklists and meeting criteria. Professionals are beginning to recognize that certification in practice becomes only an end rather than a means. “Certification is increasingly viewed as one part of a broader strategic approach to sustainability rather than the endpoint,” says Robert Strand, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Berkeley Haas School of Business, California.”3 Green rating systems like LEED may deliver environmental improvements on paper, but they may not account for carbon emissions once occupancy begins. When the checklist or stamp is awarded to a building or space, it may not measure or hold accountable long-term energy performance and maintenance. Ultimately, certification and standards for sustainability and climate action produce a structure that risks transforming sustainability into a commodity.

In the practice of architecture, marketing and branding is a central tool by which forms, projects, and spaces are communicated. Renderings, images, and drawings are the way spaces are funded and built. Marketing is intertwined with architecture by shaping how buildings are promoted and designed. Architecture has grown to rely not just on completed buildings, but also branding strategies, social media, and visual narratives. “In the building-materials industry, firms often exaggerate environmental credentials or secure collusive certification, turning ‘green building materials’ into marketing tools—undermining trust in eco-labels and calling into question the authenticity of purported sustainability.”4 Through this process, greenwashing can operate at small scales when environmental claims become aesthetics, social media clickbait, packaged, and influenced. Buildings can be declared “net-positive” or “carbon negative” long before outcomes are verified. Renderings fill visualizations with lush rooftop parks, overfill greenery, foliage, and gardens allowing the viewer to believe the structure is inherently “green”. Through this marketing, people can be easily influenced by the positive aesthetic qualities that are projected. Websites and companies use language that circumvents verification, transforming sustainability into a desire rather than a responsibility. Studies show that “green claims” through branding are often deceitful and exaggerated.5 Through real estate, developers and real estate agents have used greenwashing aesthetics to generate more sales.  However, this technique can fail, leading to distrust amongst consumers. “When consumers perceive greenwashing — mismatches between promoted and actual environmental performance — they report lower trust and brand loyalty, indicating that misleading environmental marketing can backfire once exposure happens.”6 Greenwashing through branding and marketing risks divorcing sustainability from material ecological change.

Architecture has a vital role in shaping identity, culture, and environment. Many well-known architecture firms and designers have shifted to design approaches focusing on sustainability, but projects emphasizing energy efficiency, green spaces, and biophilic design may often be superficial.

Bosco Verticale is an expansive residential dual tower complex in Milan, Italy designed by Boeri Studio in 2014. It was built in the Porta Nuova Isola area as part of a larger development project that was led by Hines Italia. The structure has been keyed as a “vertical forest”, including a staggering estimate of 5,000 shrubs, 1,000 trees, and 10,000 perennial shrubs and plants. This foliage is integrated directly onto the tower’s balconies. The goal of the project was to improve air quality, biodiversity, and aid in mitigating urban heat island effects. The studio’s ultimate vision was to showcase that greenery can coexist with high density urban living, challenging traditional forms of residential urban design and development.7

Despite its celebrated nature, the Bosco Verticale has been criticized for greenwashing; its environmental benefits may be largely symbolic over substantial. The buildings’ structure consists of reinforced concrete and steel, which produce a high embodied carbon footprint for the life cycle of the structure. “Does this mean Bosco Verticale’s breath-taking green coat and the associated enhanced building operational performance provided are a beacon of sustainability? Not entirely so, from an embodied carbon perspective or a social vantage point.”8 The carbon footprint of the labor and extraction that came from the construction materiality likely outweighs the carbon sequestration benefits of the foliage and greenery for a long time. “As Wade Graham a landscape designer and writer stated: ‘Today’s green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking at the deeper causes of our current environmental and urban discontents.’ The simple act of covering a building with vegetation is insufficient, architects must take into account the building process and the energy consumption of the building’s entire life span, to not do so and instead cover the project with superficial bushes, trees, and an occasional flower is what Greenwashing in Architecture looks like.”9 A report by the World Green Building Council states, “To support the extensive planters that house the ‘green façade’, the architects designed cantilevered concrete terraces to sustain the added weight of the vegetation. This meant that additional building materials were used in its construction and therefore added to the embodied emissions and natural resources required.”10 In addition to the materiality, the visual aesthetic of greenery may also have hidden harm. The marketing and sustainability promotion of the structure does not speak about the resource demands and maintenance of the greenery. The long-term sustainability of the project could be questioned when considering the energy required to water, prune, replace, and upkeep greenery at that scale in that location. The aesthetics, certifications, and marketing promoted in the media are widely critiqued as a form of architectural greenwashing, where aesthetics steer away from the building’s full life cycle.

The innovative integration of large-format greenery and vegetation into a high-rise residential complex is successful in rethinking urban living and promoting biodiversity. However, the lack of transparency about the long-term maintenance and embodied carbon highlights the dangers of aesthetic greenwashing in architecture to the general public. The Bosco Verticale is a structure that risks portraying an incomplete view of environmental responsibility.

Apple Park is the corporate headquarters of Apple Inc. Located in Cupertino, California. It was designed by world-renowned Foster + Partners, opening in 2017. Often called the “spaceship campus”, Apple Park spans about 175 acres with a 2.8 million square foot circular-shaped main building. The structure is surrounded by extensive landscaping, over 9,000 indigenous trees, and renewable energy systems; the campus and building are branded as a model of corporate sustainability and biodiversity. The plants, trees, and green spaces were integrated to improve air quality and provide biophilic environments for the employees and visitors. The architectural vision was harmony between technology and nature.11

While Apple Park contains many sustainable features, its purported environmental impacts have also been critiqued as greenwashing. Similar to the Bosco Verticale, the structure contains concrete and steel. These construction materiality choices do not align with a vision and progression of sustainable built environments. The carbon implications of these materials are consistently omitted when discussing the sustainability of the structure. In addition to its massive scale, the location of the campus has drawn up controversy: its size necessitated a suburban location, and with it, the architecture promotes car dependency to access. Public transportation options are limited, undermining a holistic concept of environmental accountability and accessibility as a whole. In a study on the carbon sequestration of the trees on a nearby campus, the results were poor.” Another study seemed especially applicable to Apple’s campus. In 2009, researchers at California State University Northridge studied carbon sequestration on the university’s 350-acre campus. The result: The trees sequestered less than one percent of the amount of carbon released during the same period. Put another way, the amount of carbon sequestered, at a school with 41,000 students, equaled the carbon output of eight average Americans.”12 Similar to the college campus of CSU Northridge, the high-maintenance landscaping and irrigation continue to contribute to the disconnect between Apple Park’s green branding and its measurable impact.

Economic incentives are a driver for greenwashing in the built environment. Real estate companies and developers operate under the profit motive. They will often use keywords, certifications, and environmental claims in order to increase property value and overall sales. Developers understand that ‘green” branding can directly relate to higher rents, building appeal, and sales velocity. Developers can purchase these certifications as a way to market their spaces. In this way, greenwashing can become a strategic response and a way to portray environmental responsibility as a means to maximize profit. “Greenwashing undermines credible efforts to reduce emissions and address the climate crisis. Through deceptive marketing and false claims of sustainability, greenwashing misleads consumers, investors, and the public, hampering the trust, ambition, and action needed to bring about global change and secure a sustainable planet.”13 The ultimate result is a financial logic that favors aesthetics and appearance while leaving systematic impacts untouched. Understanding the systematic logic of greenwashing is essential in order to address it. Advocacy and policies will not be able to succeed if they ignore the underlying motives that drive important design decisions.

Greenwashing is a product of perception, not performance. Aesthetics, branding, and certification function as ways to produce an impression of environmental action. The stakes of these illusions are high as the climate crisis intensifies each day; architects and designers do not have the leisure to mistake visibility for accountability. Ultimately, the critique of contemporary sustainable architecture reveals that it has become a narrative rather than a reality. In planting facades, showing off certifications, and rendering aesthetic images, the industry is planting the illusion of ecological responsibility. Challenging this illusion is a vital first step towards creating a built environment where architecture is committed to responsibility for our planet.


  1.  V. A. Dakwale and R. V. Ralegaonkar, “Review of Carbon Emission through Buildings: Threats, Causes and Solution,” International Journal of Low-Carbon Technologies 7, no. 2 (2012): 143–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijlct/ctr032 
  2. Natural Building Australia, “Adaptive Reuse vs. Demolition & New Build,” Natural Building Australia, March 24, 2025, https://naturalbuildingaustralia.org/2025/03/24/adaptive-reuse-vs-demolition-new-build/ 
  3. Elizabeth Bennett, “As Greenwashing Soars, Some People Are Questioning B Corp Certification,” BBC, February 6, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-certification-turned-into-corporate-greenwashing, 1. 
  4. Alvaro Anegon Ramos, “Greenwashing in Architecture,” Rethinking the Future, November 21, 2024, https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/architectural-community/a13442-greenwashing-in-architecture/, 1 
  5. Zihan Li, Yi Zhang, Zihan Hu, Yixi Zeng, Xin Dong, Xinbao Lu, Jie Peng, Mingtao Zhu, and Xingwei Li, “Unmasking Greenwashing in the Building Materials Industry through an Evolutionary Game Approach via Prospect Theory,” Systems 13, no. 7 (2025): 495, https://doi.org/10.3390/systems13070495, 1
  6. Lindos Daou, Elie Sayegh, Eddy Atallah, Al Maalouf, and Nada Sarkis, “Greenwashing as a Barrier to Sustainable Marketing: Expectation Disconfirmation, Confusion, and Brand–Consumer Relationships,” Sustainability 17, no. 22 (2025): 9979, https://doi.org/10.3390/su17229979, 1 
  7. ArchDaily, “Bosco Verticale / Boeri Studio,” ArchDaily, November 23, 2015, https://www.archdaily.com/777498/bosco-verticale-stefano-boeri-architetti, 1 
  8. AIPH, “Bosco Verticale, Milan,” AIPH, n.d., https://aiph.org/green-city/guidelines/case-studies/bosco-verticale-milan-4/ 
  9. Ramos, “Greenwashing in Architecture,” RTF
  10.   World Green Building Council, “It’s Not That Easy Being Green,” World Green Building Council, n.d., https://worldgbc.org/article/its-not-that-easy-being-green/ 
  11. Arquitectura Viva, “Apple Park - Foster + Partners,” Arquitectura Viva, 2017, https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/apple-park-1, 2 
  12. Fred Bernstein, “How Sustainable Is Apple Park’s Tree-Covered Landscape, Really?” ArchDaily, July 14, 2017, https://www.archdaily.com/875782/how-sustainable-is-apple-parks-tree-covered-landscape-really, 1 
  13. United Nations, “Greenwashing – the Deceptive Tactics behind Environmental Claims,” United Nations, 2025, https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/greenwashing, 1