Global events have been held for decades, with a view at ensuring the collective commitment among countries on planning and carrying out actions to stop and reverse the environmental degradation of the planet.The UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the World Commission on Environment and Development, held in 1983, were some of the main events leading up to the discussion of parameters and goals that culminated in the Agenda 21 (HANDL, 2012; LAYRARGUES, 1997; ONU, 2015), predecessor of the current Agenda 2030, which includes the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs, launched by the UN in 2015 (MMA, 2020).In the same year, the SDGs were launched and, during the 21st United Nations Climate Change Conference – COP21, the Paris Agreement was set out with main focus on actions to address climate change and its resulting impacts (MMA, 2020).Cities concentrate more than 50 percent of the population of the planet (PNUD BRASIL, 2020) and buildings alone account for 40 percent of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, architects and other players in the construction sector have a professional and ethical duty” to lead the transformation of such scenario, not only to minimize negative environmental impacts but also to establish robust and resilient solutions to a future of extreme weather events” (RIBA, 2019).The identification of the socio-economic relevance of the construction industry in Brazil (IBGE, 2020), the severity of the long-term environmental impacts generated by buildings (RIBA, 2019) and the design as the starting point of the life cycle of a building (DEGANI & CARDOSO, 2002) leads to the search, in this study, to identify the processes and design strategies that contribute to achieve sustainability in buildings, as well as to understand the role and performance of architecture professionals in this scenario.To do so, a literature review on the subject has been conducted and interviews have been carried out with some of the main architecture offices operating in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, given their importance in the Brazilian scenario.