Z E M C H 2 0 1 2 I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o n f e r e n c e
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responsible use of resources require a rethinking of housing policy and design
methodologies.
Today more than ever, the architecture takes care of two classes of important interests:
on the one hand those that reaffirm the role of factor of concrete cultural, ideological and
social root, exploring the formation and transformation of the settlements, the patterns of
behavior, habits of life and social relations that are determined; on the other hand, those
who raise new and difficult challenges in comparison with aspects of the complexity of
building in responsible harmony with the environment and variables and dynamic “needs
frameworks” of contemporary society.
It follows an operational design that must be considered simultaneously, the plurality of
relationships that operate in the implementation of design strategies:
1. new forms of living
social housing, cohousing, social participation, sharing
2. social and economic diversification
user needs, complex needs scenarios
3. habitat contemporary spaces
the housing body, the housing cell
4. responsible project
scales of intervention, environmental awareness
One of the possible topics of these studies suggests a global reflection on the specific
issue of (re) connecting the space-energy in the design of the built environment, from
complex system of the actors and actions involved in the construction process, as it is
configured with the emergence of the energy issue.
If the goal of building technologically responsible and energy-conscious, is to to practice
architecture in a correct balance between shapes and how to make it concrete, we will
work to overcome the purely technical details and evaluative/quantitative of the building,
trying to develop a cultural basis of technological character allowing the reappropriation,
by the designer, of the development of relationships between architectural structure and
procedures of its realization.
The relationship between space, technique and material flows, energy and information,
(in building but also in the larger scale of the settlement) is now to be interpreted through
a investigation into new relationships between the material aspects of the construction
process and the intellectual and cultural variables that characterize the intervention.
Quality and quantity are chasing then into a new mode of formation and construction of
the habitat, sensitive to energy issues.
New materials, new construction techniques, innovative procedures of calculation,
assessment and certification of building products and the no less important procedures
of funding and incentives for installation of systems and solutions to maximize the
energy efficiency of buildings, contribute to re-frame the design and construction process
in an operational scenario in which decisions are much more complex.
The technological culture of the project takes on a particularly central role, because it
occurs in two main fields of interest:
• the use of technical and materials resources, necessary for the proper energy-efficient
responsible building (product technologies related to materials, components and
construction systems, technical components, innovative systems the production from
renewable sources);
• cognitive and evaluative tools for direction, manipulation of space and control of the
energy performance of buildings (process technologies related to software, laws, rules
and procedures to design, evaluate and certify).
The ideogram proposed, undoubtedly tendentious in defining roles and competences of
the formative process of the project, illustrates the unitary nature and dual nature of
energy issues.
