Portrait eines progressiven Entwurfsparameters
Jacopo Deplano
According to calculations by the United Nations, we have reached the threshold of eight billion people on our planet. The associated challenges for humanity and the environment are omnipresent. Finite resources collide with the needs and material consumption of a rapidly growing world population. Our construction activity is a sector that has been largely overlooked by society so far, yet it significantly contributes to environmental pollution, being responsible for 60% of global resource consumption, 50% of global waste production, 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 35% of global energy consumption.
For millennia, building has been closely intertwined with the location and the materials available. Humans, as part of nature, whose system is based on the basic principle of the cycle, in which all substances and energy sources are reused, and which knows no waste or losses. Only the achievements of industrialization and scientific progress in the fields of energy, metallurgy, and chemistry opened up an unprecedented variety of applications that allowed us to abandon this system. A process of detachment accompanied by materials that are unknown to nature, for which its cycle-based system has no use. As manufacturers of these materials, we must take full responsibility and cannot absolve ourselves of that responsibility through the concept of waste. From this idea, this work portrays design parameters of a circular architecture, in which materials, products, or constructions are reintroduced into closed loops after their period of use, without any loss of quality or value.
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