S-Tiles - costruire/rinnovare

BUILD/RENOVATE RESPONSABLY

For a long time there has been a trend to identify sustainable architecture with the image of vernacular buildings in a rural Arcadia. Cities after all are noisy, dirty, congested, resource hungry, and polluting. But sustainability is about more than a ‘back to the land’ lifestyle choice, sustainability is about facing-up to a century in which we need to make drastic changes. According to the INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC), if the trend towards global warming is to be reversed, carbon dioxide emissions may need to be cut, not by the 12% agreed at Kyoto, but by between 60% and 80% by 2050.

Even if in many cases the traffic congestion remains the most visible problem today, the big challenge of sustainability for the city of the future is energy saving, which means less greenhouse gas emissions. The energy used in construction, constitutes more than 40% of the total European Union energy consumption and, given the constant growth in the sector, it is destined to increase. There are programs like the strategy on “Sustainable Construction” managed by the European Commission, that help the building sector to face the challenge of energy saving and ecological construction. In the US the LEED SILVER STANDARD sets out guidelines and rewards companies who construct and renovate buildings efficiently.

In Italy, the cities of Faenza and Padua were awarded in 2000 the ENEA – SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PRIZE, for the results achieved in this area. The city of Faenza adopted a sustainable urban plan that rewards those who build according to the principles of bio-construction encouraging more suitable building by reducing local government taxes by 75%. The municipality of Padua has renovated most of its buildings on the basis of saving energy and using renewable sources, for example installing a solar plant to power a sport centre.