Buildings with a negative carbon footprint
#Sustainability
2023-05-11Today, we are beginning to talk about regenerative buildings, which not only do not harm the environment (and we’re talking about their entire lifecycle) but actually improve it. Their construction is not part of the problem; it’s part of the solution.
The issue, as always, is of an economic nature.
This is our project, the second-place winner in the #ReinventingCities competition in 2020, in the Crescenzago area.
Beautiful or not, it had one great virtue: it was already a regenerative building, going beyond the competition’s requirement for carbon neutrality. Why second place? I can’t say for certain, but I strongly suspect the issue was economic. We were aware of this, and during the second phase, the multidisciplinary design team, consisting of various firms and consultants, collectively decided to pursue meeting the competition’s requirements even at the expense of economic return, thinking that failing to meet the minimum target would result in a loss regardless. Clearly, it was a wrong move. To be clear, there was a financial return, but I believe it wasn’t high enough. So much so that during the presentation of the next edition, the City Councillor made it clear that they were not only looking for great climate ideas (immodestly, I thought he was talking about us), but the ideas that were more economically viable because they were more likely to be realized.
He is certainly right, but here lies the real problem: how do we make the impossible demands possible? Should the demands be scaled down or should the profits?
It would be easy for me to say the profits, but I don’t believe that’s the solution, just as utopian demands cannot be scaled down (we can’t afford that). It’s probably time to find new ways to make ends meet, but it can’t be just us architects thinking about it because, even though a lot can be done regarding the price/quality ratio, there is a limit below which we cannot go.
Innovative economic mechanisms and utopian yet practical demands need to be designed from the outset; otherwise, achieving both outcomes at the levels we need won’t be possible.