Regenerative Design and Hybrid Buildings to Address Climate Change

Abstract

Is it possible to redefine the space of action, of project and experimental type, of the regenerative design, following the scenarios of climate change and for the questions related to the incidence of the construction sector and the production of architecture and urban spaces? Does the hybrid building model respond to the need to achieve climate neutrality performance levels by 2050? This text, as a contribution to the ongoing research on advanced sustainable design, conducted within ABITAlab, proposes some possible trajectories in the field of frontier research, opening up the possibility of re-founding some theoretical paradigms, after having gone through applied experiences on “prototype cases”, activities with a strong innovative character with the generation of new operational models, interpretation and management of data and resources, simulation and prototyping of solutions and evaluation of results with advanced tools of ecological and digital design. In this contribution are provided some important references of literature and critical reconstruction of the new principles on “zero impact” and “zero net buildings”, in the need to refound a metric and assessment tools in a circular key, in order to experiment with the approaches of advanced design and its prototyping on case studies, the real possibility to respond to the great challenge posed by environmental and climate issues in the transition scenarios ′30, ′50, ′85 (IPPC). The discussion frames the research trajectory, investigating between radial and continuous innovation, as an operational space on which to conduct experiments, to produce design methodologies that even in the context of transition scenarios, are able to produce predictive models whose role becomes that of founding multiple ecological and digital assets towards climate neutrality.