Teaching Environmental Technological Design. Fostering meaningful learning integrating green infrastructure into architectural and urban design

Environmental risks such as failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation—which is considered the most potentially impactful risk and the third most likely, with water crises, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse (WEF 2016: 6)—are rising up the list of worldwide concerns. Landscape architects, and other professionals from related disciplines, are deemed to contribute with “adaptive” architectural and urban design levering on nature-based solutions and appropriate technologies1 (Schumacher 1974; Thormann 1979) in order to mitigate negative impacts and strengthen resilience.2 While researchers and scientists have discussed ecosystem services for many decades, the Ecosystem Services concept itself became popular with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) only in the early 2000s. The specific contribution of ‘Green Infrastructure’ (GI) to the provision of Ecosystem Services (MA 2003) is still mostly unexplored in European landscape architecture and architectural and urban design professional practice. It is therefore important that students of building professions—landscape architects, architects and engineers—exchange experience and co-learn how the integration of GI into architectural and urban design can help create more sustainable urban settings. In the environmental technological design studio taught by the author at the Faculty of Architecture of ‘Sapienza’ Università di Roma, students are asked to develop their project focusing on GI specialized design strategies and construction techniques in order to implement adaptive interventions aiming at resilient architecture and inclusive urban design. The key learning objectives of the courses are: the provision of cultural and methodological references and of technical and operative tools to realize—in a coherent relationship with the built environment—bio-eco-oriented environmental technological design interventions at both architectural and urban scale. The learning activities help develop experimental knowledge of the diagnostic methods for environmental and cultural heritage, and of the key strategies for its requalification, valorisation and restoration, in particular through the GI design approach. The main goal is to sensitise students to the urgent need of long-run equilibrium conditions among settlements, anthropogenic activities and Natural Capital, in a dynamic scenario of technological innovation and sustainability.