Eco Strategies: 10 imperatives for an ecological approach

Working with contemporaneity implies facing with the crises of our society. They can be environmental, socio-economic or political. They usually relate to the bad use of our resources or to the tendency of not experimenting new strategies. The consumerist society devours every spot in town, every public space crossing the boundaries of any green areas. It attacks the context we continuously live in. Our cities are the scenario of this approach. The heterogeneous materials are the results of this complexity. Overcoming these crises means learning how to aim our actions to future, common and shared expectations. It means using our territory and resources with a more aware and sustainable approach. Therefore, the central role of education: our society needs to learn how to theorize, conceptualize and realize new sustainable processes using new approaches. They must be based on the fundamental assumption that geological, biological atmospheric and human phenomena are an interacting combination of forces and structures, as the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky stated in the early twentieth century. One of the main aim of didactics should be investigating on new systemic project strategies as a real alternative to the continuous consumption of soil, to the uncontrolled expansion of cities and to the unlimited exploitation of natural resources. From this perspective, the principal areas of intervention are: the urban voids, the unused areas, the brown areas, the soil and the subsoil by using multifunctional hybrid models able to activate more productive and social economic and ecological processes. The historical city par excellence: Rome, which represents my major studies, has a large number of “down areas”. In this city, inexpensive and widespread architectonic projects on a small-scale may involve movements of transformation. The above mentioned areas in the city, a scar in the territory, are often problematic urban areas, abandoned buildings and they should be turned into “green factories” seen as propelling centers linked one to another and capable of improving and upgrading our metropolis. A system of “metropolitan eco- friendly armor”, in other words, architectures seen as complex organisms that arch over the city and, by doing so, are able to cure the different systems. What didactics is meant to produce are systemic models able to turn our modern cities into self-sufficient “eco-cities”, self-able to use both, new form of energy and new ways of disposing of the slag produced by the urban metabolism1. By doing so, one can reduce the human impact on the environment. From this point of view, new “smart creatures” should be created working together with responsive architecture, intelligent models (technologically advanced or not) and “machines” able to adapt themselves to the context they are in. They should work as every living being does, trying to minimize the impact of consumption and to produce energy so that an economic cycle can be injected and sociality to be created. This should work in an entire area as well as in a little building or in a single urban element. In this sense, “the architectonic object is not intended in absolute terms but in terms of relationships in a multi- stratified contest packed with elements”2. The architect does not deal with a final closed and immovable configuration (phenotype). His aim is to plan a system able to generate a variety of potentially unlimited solutions (genotype) that, in a compositional and working coherence, will be able to adapt themselves to the environmental conditions in which they have to operate. In this way, architecture thus becomes a performing hybrid able to contain different functions, capable of rebuilding nature and reimbursing over populated areas in which pollution and degradation have exceeded the safety limits. Simultaneously, new recovery and recycling strategies have to be adopted. Policies aimed to both environmental protection in building processes and a socio-economic growth should be introduced. Thinking about the life-cycle of materials and architectures, studying new ways of re-using waste products in order to employ them during building processes3, is fundamental. In this perspective, the role of the new software is of a great importance when conceiving and creating new architectural organisms.