Living in the age of complexity. Indoor air quality between technology, people and nature

Over the last half-century, society has faced the scene of its future self-destruction and the unique condition of being aware of it, witnessing the alarms and warnings for our well-being and lifestyles. The anthropic landscape remains in a state of physical and environmental degradation, with settle- ments and communities experiencing social distress, pollution and inequality. Physical space, and its formal and social outcomes, are the product of human activity on the environment, adapted and ma- nipulated to build settlements according to unsustainable lifestyles. Before the second industrialisa- tion, human settlements were created by adapting human needs to the characteristics of the natural environment without compromising resources. Today, such ability to respectfully inhabit places is lost. The rate of technological innovation is weakened by consumerist logic, rather than strengthened in the direction of well-being and impact, and the construction industry is not immune to this trend. Health, safety and sustainability are the tracks that should guide development and innovation, both social and technological, the paper aims to rediscover and update these concepts within the construc- tion process, to pursue a new balance between the built and natural environment.