HOME / PROJECTS / EVENTS / PRESS RELEASE / DOWNLOAD / CREDITS
ITALIANO

Sustainab.Italy is the result of a desire to monitor and support excellence in sustainable Italian architecture. A continuation of the research entitled Contemporary ecologies; energies for Italian Architecture, created in 2006 for the 5th Architecture Biennale in Brasilia, Sustainab.Italy represents Italian architectural production during the London Festival of Architecture 2008 with an exhibition of projects, focused on sustainability and the work of young Italian architects attentive to the union between formal qualities, aesthetics and social issues and respect for the environment, innovation and the recovery of our built heritage.

Sustainab.Italy is the result of a “call for papers”, a public request made to Italian architects: of the 147 submissions received, we have selected 41 projects, the majority of which have been constructed. They demonstrate the vitality of contemporary Italian architecture and its ability to confront the challenges of our era through innovative solutions. The selected projects are located throughout Italy and, we are happy to say, in foreign countries such as Portugal, Burkina Faso, Brazil and China. The quantity of projects presented testifies to the fact that the sensibility and experience of Italian design - which has always dealt with the recovery of architectural heritage, interventions in historical centres and insertions within the landscape - has created a fertile terrain for an Italian approach to sustainability, where cultural and architectural heritage and the landscape are seen as essential primary resources to be conserved.  
The complexity of the factors that define the idea of “sustainability” (economic development, respect of the environment, social equity, cultural differences) mean that there is no one aesthetic formula capable of synthesising this concept.
  
The various projects approach one or more of these issues on a case-by-case basis. The selection of projects was used to define three thematic areas, in no way intended to be exhaustive, that underline the basic issues that the projects attempted to respond to with an innovative and necessarily strong social impetus: At the Human Scale, Fragments of Landscape and Energies for the Environment.

Sustainab.Italy is promoted by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities PARC - General Directorate for Landscape Quality and Protection, Contemporary Architecture and Art the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs DGPCC - General Directorate for Cultural Promotion and Cooperation and the Italian Cultural Institute in London.