"Heritage for a Sustainable Future" aims at urging students to watch in retrospect at our past for progressing in the future. This is to revisit sustainable building techniques able to respect our planet and reinventing them into a new perspective of architectural forms and structural designs so to reshape our cities of the future.
Pushing sustainability in architecture forward is one of the big challenges that the Architects and the Engineers of the Future are called to answer. We acknowledge the significance of taking this challenge and looking for resilient and safe solutions for the conservation of our existing architectural heritage. This is by understanding these as examples of sustainable use of resources able to inspire the conception of new construction systems more in tune with "local culture, climate and environment and thereby encouraging climate change mitigation and adaptation". (UNESCO, 2022).
Then, conceiving increasingly and more sustainable building techniques means to take advantage from our multi-faced heritage in its reality of an object of knowledge so to progress in the future, while reactivating our architectural heritage into the daily life of people. This is so to transmit this intact to posterity while meeting the needs of our planet in CO2 reduction.
Avoiding dereliction by repurposing heritage is certainly part of a larger concept that aims at satisfying the ever-increasing need for housing of our modern societies - thus, revisiting ancient and more sustainable building techniques for the design of new city sectors, which are, here, understood to be fully reversible so to meet the needs of citizens to move and reside freely across the territory of the EU, as well as the rest of the world. Houses will no longer be fixed on ground; these will freely move along with their owners. Further, this is aiming at addressing migration phenomena as well as emergency preparedness strategies, which is now becoming less exceptional and more conventional due to climate change. Populations in town are, at time, struck by natural disasters and forced to massively relocate in more safe and secure areas.
This research project hopes to satisfy these needs by researching on the novel concept of fully reversible construction systems.
These building systems are largely drawing inspiration from the design of temples - thus, taking advantage from the use of natural stones set in rows of interlocking stones having dry joints and possessing stable configurations of equilibrium due to their weight balance as well as designed so to accommodate recycled lead and glass, reshaped ina form of blocks of artificial pumice, so to provide buildings with climate comfort and meeting modern living standards as well as new energetic requirements for buildings.
This is so to meet the needs of our planet in a CO2 reduction as well as the one of flexible housing by the help of natural materials, which are reversible, modular, recyclable, and able to build solid constructions in a great variety of forms in a novel concept of temporary city sectors.
This knowledge, it is also intended to be spent in the reactivation of existing architectural heritage that is lacking integrity and / or seeking for a new purpose - thus, into the design of new additions. Then, this is also intended to push sustainability forward in the design of new architecture by exploring new horizons in the design of masonry constructions and city landscapes.
Tasks and Expected Outcomes
Due to the wide spectrum of disciplines interdisciplinarity crossed by this research project, the exact tasks to be given to students can depend on both students' background and interest. Particularly, architectural visualizations on the different combinations of masonry patterns as well as flexible solutions for housing and architectural surfaces are in the mirror of this supervision. Further, non-linear analyses for in-plain and out-of-plain mechanisms of collapse, based on quasi-statics models, so to structurally assess the different masonry combinations as well as deterioration phenomena in natural stones and cyclic actions are foreseen. For those, who possess a background, working on solutions for improving the transformation process of glass into pumice is welcome.
Expected outcomes can vary from structural analyses to architectural designs as well as models for the management of reused construction material and flexible compositions of these, which are taking advantage from existing experimental data already produced at our Chair.
