Recycled materials in building construction : a module at Abbiategrasso

The design of buildings has always been a complex matter, not least because life cycles are extremely long and it is difficult to predict what will happen in future. Nowadays, this challenge is made even more compelling because environmental crisis would be the next decades most important debate. Houses belong to the longest-lived parts of a cities infrastructure. People spend most of their lifetime in their home. It’s the time to reexamine the idea of Home. Buildings are neither planned nor built to save energy. Buildings are mainly designed to provide living and working spaces, a healthy indoor environment where people can comfortably live and work together in a productive manner. The thermal ergonomics of the indoor environment, interactions between natural light, acoustics, heat, indoor air quality, active and passive use of solar energy, use of renewable energy, geothermal energy are prime characters which promotes towards a energy-plus-house with sustainable integration of technologies. The buildings in the next decades would no longer be the consumers of the energy but they will become part of the energy generating system. ‘STONE 2.0’: On the theme of sustainable buildings on the environment, a Module will be built with the help of students and teachers in an intensive workshop which can work as base for further analysis and tests. Using the idea of Solar Decathlon competition as guidelines, where a prototype module unit can be combined to work also as support function for the nearby amphitheater built adjacent to Palazzo Stampa at Abbiategrasso.Thermal mass is crucial to good passive solar heating design. Water has a high heat capacity and about 3 times thermal storage capacity than concrete, therefore, is sometimes used as thermal mass in buildings. Our research is also to explore the potential of water as thermal mass and feasibility of using it as a building material. The use of Efficient low energy embodied materials or ‘upcycled’ waste materials provides better prospects to achieve a net zero energy, zero carbon and highly sustainable houses. Also focusing on the synergy between energy-efficiency in terms of envelope and renewable energy utilization to achieve a balanced energy budget over an annual cycle. The flexibility in space can be achieved in using prefabricated, dry construction techniques using low carbon footprint materials and focus on cost-effectiveness. Carefull orientation and shading of the space can drastically reduce energy demand and improve the performance of the building, minimizing at the same time the global costs. Besides common building systems and building physics-related aspects, modeling and simulation are need to address multiple scales between occupant, prototype and community to quantify prediction uncertainties. The rapid emergence of BIM process can help us improve the efficiency of organizing and distributing information/data during the evolution of design until the construction process.