Design + sustainability

This article was published on the Design attachment, on newsstands with Vanity Fair until June 21st

Essential: today we cannot talk about design without talking about sustainability and, vice versa, sustainable projects, without a design thinkingwould not stand up. Mario Cucinella (in the picture) famous architect and designer, winner of various international awards, has been integrating environmental and energy strategies into his works for years, so much so that he founded a dedicated school: it is called SOS School of Sustainability: «We try to help young people to build a vision and to have clear the objectives of the 2030-2050 agenda». When we talk about sustainability, however, we mean something that goes beyond the ecological aspect and that implies a necessary social attention: «Sustainability must not be exclusive, but inclusive. Now more than ever we are tormented by the issue of consumption and then it is something to consider when, for example, low-cost social houses are built: it is important that they have good energy performance not only for the environment, but also so that maintenance can do not be burdensome for the weaker groups who go to live there ».

His famous Tecla project, a house made of 3D printed earth, is a concrete example of how a good, apparently utopian idea can instead be realized: “We built a building that well represents the ambitions of the agenda: zero kilometer recycled materials with zero emissions of CO2. Perhaps it is not the prototype of the future, but we have broken some paradigms. Now we are ready with an evolution of Tecla and it will certainly be a step closer to the home of tomorrow ». And tomorrow a house will have to be built of necessity with low-impact materials: “Wood”, continues the architect, “is an important material again, but planning is needed: on the one hand we want to use wood to build buildings, but at the same time we want to reforest the planet. In general, it will take sobriety and instead of always looking ahead, we could look around and understand what we can reuse of what is already there “.

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