Green Products for Sustainable Architectures

Building materials have changed more deeply after 18th century than in the previous 13,000 years, and much more in the last few decades. The enormous availability of energy and technologies, supported by a market that expands the effects of the industrialised mass-production, fostering the intense consumption of its outputs, has drastically accelerated the process, highlighting several intrinsic critical aspects of it. Thus, providing more products and better performances in this way, did not increase the welfare as expected, but is causing the opposite effect to make serious disturbances to the life conditions on Earth, affecting also the opportunities for further development. Reacting to this paradigm, the notion of circular economy has been launched since the late 1960s, assuming that economic systems must function as organisms, to ensure that the output of every withdrawal of resources from the ecosystem and of each process of transformation and use of these resources is effectively re-introduced in the cycle and used to feed other processes. To take the promising path toward the adoption of a circular approach in building design and construction, at least two main topics need knowledge enhancement, avoiding making them critical barriers. The first concerns the relationships between architecture and time, while the second, and probably even more challenging topic, refers to the effective involving all the many actors of the complex decision processes of designing, making, and operating building, including the huge supply chain which feeds them. Since the digitalisation of all the stages of this process is the main and disruptive innovation dynamic we are facing, the success of circular economy appears to be strictly related to its integration into the process of digital management and the availability of reliable computational data on building product environmental performances.