1001768_2 - SOSTENIBILITA' E INNOVAZIONE DEL PROGETTO

1_DESCRIPTION

The subject entitled ‘Sustainability and Innovation in Design’ is included in the 5th year of the Architectural Design Laboratory, as per the corresponding cohort regulations. The content relating to the subject area of ‘Technological and Environmental Design in Architecture’ aims to develop a curriculum profile on sustainable and innovative design, providing students with the tools to address ‘complexity’ from an organisational-functional and morphological-structural point of view, with high technological and environmental performance as required in scenarios of climate change, towards the decarbonisation of energy and material cycles and flows, within processes of transformation, regeneration and adaptability of cities, urban fabrics and buildings. The scope of application becomes that of transformations for the built environment and advanced ecological and regenerative design, so that technical thinking and technological action do not constitute an obstacle to this necessary way of thinking and acting, but promote new conditions for action as an authentic response to the emergency. Anthropocene, Fourth Industrial Revolution, global warming, climate crisis. From “consumer cities” to “resilient cities”, from “product technologies” to “enabling technologies”, the processes of “adaptation and mitigation”. A new ecological order, which we could define as “natureless” (Morton, 2007), in the need to fully understand the issue of climate change, in its condition of resilience, when it is declined to include the state of modification of the atmosphere due to the impacts generated by productive activities. This condition still awaits and seeks 'the project', which in its strategic process of visions and predictions must go beyond a time that we have always defined as “sustainable” in terms of how it was to be achieved in the short, medium and long term, but which today, in the unmediated challenge with the physical state of the planet in relation to its overpopulation, finds itself without any temporal definition, in new spaces of behaviour and objects. The process of “advanced design” in space and time, as understood in this way, must carry out actions of 'hypersustainability' (Nava, 2019) or even “strong sustainability” (Nava, 2023), in which the theme of the relationship between information, resources and enabling technologies is found in the more complex logic of circular process management (upcycling of material resources and flows) for resilient scenarios (in the context of climate change). This is a new physical, environmental, social and economic context, but also a new sharing of resource and data flows, in which citizens everywhere must transform themselves into “communities in transition”, both in terms of their awareness of living in a time of constant change and their ability to assess their participation in measures of resistance and responsiveness.

2_COURSE PROGRAMME

The disciplinary themes of the year contribute to the theme of the Laboratory: ‘The City of the Sun. The Social Housing and Integrated Services Project for Circular and Energy Communities in Urban Areas in Reggio Calabria’.

The “agile city” comes “after the city” (Lerup, 2016), but it is no longer traceable in the super-metropolis; it is the city capable of implementing all kinds of measures and boundaries related to physical and environmental factors and making use of digital technologies. We need to make the “emergency” the natural condition that is not identified with risk and degradation, that manages impacts, that changes the structure of its natural and artificial systems, attempting new “ecological climaxes” and reconfiguring urban, extra-urban, territorial and new geographical scenarios each time, as “unstable refoundations of different ways of living”, until the next climatic or natural event. In this new physical dimension, the very concepts of “environment and landscape” are increasingly close and inclined towards their ability to recognise impacts and transformations of the natural and built environment, as a “rediscovered ecosystemic and transformative resilience”. The signal that, if something changes, due to an immediate impact, the structures of the environment change and the landscape units declare it in a much shorter time than the effects of the impacts, declares a new predictive condition of environmental emergency.

Four of the five theoretical issues addressed in the text by the professor ‘Emerging Technologies for Regenerative Design’ (C. Nava, 2023), on innovation and sustainability, transferred from practice, and five approaches, methods and processes are highlighted that seek competing dimensions and values for regenerative design in its different socio-technical conditions. The five issues are as follows:

1. From Enabling Technologies to Emerging Technologies: radical innovation and agile innovation in exaptation processes

2. Performative Digital Technologies: regenerative design and strong sustainability

3. End-of-life Adaptive Technologies: circular design challenges carbon and climate neutrality

4. Distributive Technologies: positive design from clusters to hybrid buildings

The technological culture of environmental design, between innovation and sustainability, has based its paradigmatic strength on the “relationship between theory and practice”, on the results of design experimentation, which has effectively changed the paradigms, even those previously referred to, and pushed them towards “demonstrative” and “exportable” conditions for every transformative action, freeing itself from old disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The project, understood as design and therefore “project/action”, has regained its responsibility in terms of scientific and technological transfer.

Integrated and applied experimentation is proposed in three urban areas of the city of Reggio Calabria, with the aim of producing an architectural and urban project of “Circular Regeneration in Scenarios of Climate Change and Urban Transformation”, with high performance in terms of sustainability and innovation, capable of addressing three different approaches and methods in three different areas: Arangea urban area (urban and architectural completion project); the urban area of the Historic Centre (urban and architectural replacement project); the urban area of Catona (Northern Suburbs) (completely new urban and architectural project).

The contribution of the discipline will follow the approaches, methods and tools of the Regenerative Digital Project.

In “Architecture & Resilience. Interdisciplinary dialogues” edited by K. Trogale, I. Bauman, R. Lawrence, D. Petrescu (2019), Proceedings of the International Conference organised by the Sheffield School of Architecture in 2015 'Architecture and Resilience on the Human Scale', refers to the need for a new narrative to define a scale of resilience that concerns cities, regions and globalisation, and glimpses the need for an ethical dimension and a new pedagogy of resilience to manage a new imagination for design culture and a necessary imaginary constructed for communities. The introduction to the text refers to the need for a “big idea”, on a par with the technologies that must guide the transformation of cities, between physical and digital conditions, in redefining “resilience” as a radical concept, which has as much to do with the impact of disruptive innovation as with the impact of an important social dimension in the transfer of its tactics and actions.

The human scale of resilience transforms communities into “placemakers” and, in the era of climate change, through the spatial dimension, gives citizens back the right to operate in a local dimension, as “communities of practice” (e.g. as “energy communities”).

3_EXPECTED RESULTS

The expected results will be measured against the activities carried out each week (UT), as part of the Laboratory and in conjunction with the Architectural and Urban Design discipline within the Laboratory.

Each UT provides a path for students to acquire the knowledge transferred, for which bibliographic support, case studies and exercise guides will be provided.

At the end of this exploratory process, students are asked to acquire the disciplinary terms and issues investigated in lectures, seminars and discussions on the exercises for experimentation.

In particular

-   Knowledge and understanding will be exercised through classroom testing at the end of each UT with brainstorming activities on key topics and with the involvement of the class (construction of an illustrated glossary)

-   Applied knowledge and understanding, through the proposal of experimentation on each UT, drafting and presentation in the classroom during the course

-   Autonomy of judgement, through involvement and interaction during seminar activities, with the request to formulate critical observations and insights in a shared discussion

-   Communication skills through classroom discussion for intermediate tests on the UTs and the final exam

-   The ability to learn, stimulated by different teaching activities and verified on the bibliography of assigned texts and the search for further study to carry out practical activities by each student.