Tradition and innovation: a comparative evaluation

Environmental differences – both climatic and geo-material – that are present in the different regions of the world and which have produced the variety of anthropical landscapes of our cultural heritage, can often be traced back to the same limits. In the Abruzzo region for example, in the landscape that stretches from the mountains to the sea, it’s possible to see material cultures and territories that are very different from each other, both because of the material and the techniques used for building them. So the hilly territory, which is characterised by mud houses, “archetypal” of appropriate and ecological building, can be found alongside the coastal landscape, which is dotted with “trabocchi”, that is, wooden constructions which are the results of choices tied to local resources and material cultures. The rural inland area and the cliffs between the land and the sea are fragile territories today, at risk of contamination because of heavy construction and a lack of adequate controls. The expansion of the historic town centres towards the countryside and the building carried out for tourism which comes closer and closer to the water line, show interventions that have little figurative quality, that are not appropriate to the setting and are even less of an adequate response to the present need to limit consumption of material and energy resources. The study that is presented here, which has been developed with reference to two case studies of new buildings in rural and coastal environments, tries to investigate ways of carrying out and installing that have a low impact. Methods based on the recovery of traditional methods of building of that region and the adoption of new approaches to design, moving towards Eco-design. To do this, it uses LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) instruments of evaluation to qualify and compare the energy-environmental performance associated with the different building, running and dismissal of the projects. The comparative analysis of them, carried out on the basis of environmental data taken from international archives, has allowed the verification of how the use of local materials (raw earth for making thick walls, wood for the framework, the fixtures and fittings) allows us to obtain a significant reduction in the use of prime materials used for the production of building elements, and for heating the environments besides the CO2 absorbed by plants during their useful life.