Manifesto for the sustainable design quality. Edit by Ilaria Di Carlo

TALL/UNITN, 2011

 

Sustainability is not enough, sustainability has been abused, and sustainability risks are losing their true meaning: for this reason, we are working on the first collective advertising, to share with all those who care about the destiny of a town, about architectures, objects and products that are truly sustainable, but above all aesthetically meaningful.

• 0

  Sustainability is a project that arose from a good context relationship. Contexts diverge and even diverging is a design response.

• 1

  Sustainability is the project answer to the contradictions of a contemporary town, built by summation. The sustainable answer is: to the idea of architectures and cities like “biotopes”, less built-up spaces, more widespread naturalness and new landscapes, more quality.

• 2

  Sustainability is thinking of an approach of “Urban Biology” instead of simple planning. “Urban Biology” as a design process and morphogenetic landscaping; sustainable is thinking of organic and self-organising relationships between the humans and the spaces in which they live.

• 3

  Sustainability means regenerating all the public parts of the town through a continuous process of “urban acupuncture” to rebuild centrality, above all in peripheral areas, by forming an extensive network of comfortable spaces that are aesthetically qualifying and socially aggregating.

• 4

  Sustainability is the use of natural materials and contemporary forms - natural materials coming from environmentally sustainable processes and that do not produce irreversible environmental alterations – by guiding the future production of natural materials and above all “ecologically performing”, result of recycling and re-composition, in order to not exploit nature continuously and to use new technologies at best.

• 5

  Sustainability is the adoption of the design-project as a tool providing widespread quality to any object, product and building. Design and project complete the good process of energy and environment protocols providing only quality of construction, which is far from architectural quality and good design of a good urban design. Design as a “form of cultivation” proposing new artificial ecologies where morphology is linked to the processes of functioning and where systems are generated instead of “manufactured”.

• 6

  Sustainability is the new urban culture, introducing the concept of real participation of citizens in the decisions at the base of the transformation of the places in which they live. It is proposing the comparison of projects through competitions and exhibitions of plans related to spaces and buildings that future use will involve community. Through design, an aesthetic quality tool, “meta-language” capable of offering important sensitive information, needed for knowledge, adaptability and thus well-being.

• 7

  Sustainability is also unpredictability, surprise and innovation embodied in the language of transition. The participatory approach, also known as “bottom-up” implies precisely that: architecture, as a “collective form” relates to the quality generated by countless individual decisions, physical traces of its complexity.

• 8

  Sustainability means bringing the countryside back to its productive origin, natural and continuous maintenance, quality of territory and identity of landscape, by avoiding the continuous erosion of urban areas that are stealing space from nature.

• 9

  Sustainability is design, intensifying the presence of differences: biological, financial and social issues (ecology, as defined by Guattari in his ecosofic work “The 3 ecologies”, is precisely the logic of intensities).

• 10

  Sustainability means thinking of infrastructures as opportunities for new and different relationships with landscape, territory and town, by imagining that the processes of the construction protocols are also applied to these artefacts, ensemble of new aesthetic, design and landscape values. It is overcoming the generic environmental evaluation by introducing the most detailed and complex evaluation of risk and landscape. Sustainable also means imagining that the network project includes the strengthening of the virtual networks to reduce traffic and pollution as well as the different exchange relationships, and thinking always more of technology as a tool helping mitigate and control roadway flows and reducing emissions following allometric models.

• 11

  Sustainability means adopting design methods and instruments that have the capability of getting as close as possible to the paths of nature. It means imagining that any new building arises from the attentive reading of the place, without producing any alterations and integrating in a coherent, natural and harmonic way, as nature teaches.

• 12

  Sustainability means compacting against expansion: compacting towns, buildings, places, waste, materials and processes of construction. Not by dramatically decreasing, but rather by continuing growing intelligently.