Architecture, Industry and Sustainability

Abstract

Spain’s recent growth model, much too tightly bound to opportunistic property development, is unquestionably the least sustainable in Europe. The rise in the rate of the country’s historically high energy dependence, which at no time in the last decade dipped below 80%, stands as proof of such unsustainability.

The need to build housing with new, built-in passive strategies and active techniques geared to savings, effi ciency and enhanced domestic comfort, and the growing complexity of the associated solutions, are factors that indisputably transcend the limits of traditional housing design and construction. That fast declining model has merely replaced skilled labour, a legacy of former structures organized around trades, with the willing but unskilled labour of immigrant workers. In this new context, energy effi ciency will surely be the key concept that will open the gates to renovated industrialization: savings and effi ciency from the outset through controlled design and manufacturing; worksite effi ciencies and the savings deriving from speedier construction; savings and effi ciency during the building’s service life as a result of the technology deployed; and even savings and effi ciency when the building is no longer usable, preparing it for a "good death": recycling. All the foregoing are undoubtedly parameters of considerable signifi cance in the new sustainability paradigm. Open product catalogues will be needed to recover industry for architecture. In view of the paucity of such catalogues, however, the few that do exist must be modifi ed or "tuned" as a fi rst step toward instituting sound and general industrialization.