Rehabilitation and Sustainability: Research, Experiences and Proposals for the urban redevelopment

The paper is aimed at moving the issues of sustainable design from the field of technical matter exclusive for plugging it back in the core of architecture discipline. So the major objective of the research is to support the studies on rehabilitation in terms of adapting the sustainable design approach to the building refurbishment specific and to the urban redevelopment, postulating the requirement of assessing project consistency with both the need of updating functions and of increasing the ecological efficiency of the built environment. The study works on the assumption that the city environment and its building stock represent a sort of capitalization of the total of natural resources embedded in it (energy, water, construction material), a kind of past investment that participates of the whole cost of that asset. The value of such capitalization is both in its material consistency and in its capacity of interacting with the city environment. In fact, in terms of optimizing such previous resources investment, building refurbishment and maintenance correspond to the instance of stretching the life cycle of such kind of “products”, extending the benefits coming from the pre-production phase. The analysis of the Life Cycle of some traditional construction technologies shows us a sort of implicit care to match natural cycles with the artificial ones, balancing the time of consumption of the construction product with the renewal of the natural resources used for producing it, considering the materials supply as a sort of unique, local natural stock.