A Semiotic Framework to Support Sustainable Design Inside Mediterranean Cities

AbstractIn recent years the concept of sustainability in architecture has often been confused with the concept of green buildings, which restricts the issues to energy savings, environmental governance and the protection of nature. The Brundtland Report defined sustainable development as that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, but since then a different current of opinion has arisen, which supports a view that sustainability refers rather to the idea of long-term preservation, maintenance and conservation of existing conditions, without producing deterioration. Such a view is currently gaining strength and is even more relevant if we consider the Mediterranean area, which features natural and urban territories with a huge cultural legacy and sense of place attachment. In this context, when designing and constructing new buildings, renovating existing ones or regenerating urban areas, attention must be paid to preserving the surrounding environment, which expresses its own language, patiently produced over time. Current architectural production that wants to adopt a design approach which considers sustainability as preservation and conservation without forgoing a contemporary factor, must use a language that is understood in the context into which it will be placed. For some years a group from Università Iuav di Venezia has been working on an instrument with which to interpret an architectural text according to a logic that reflects the architect’s way of thinking at the design stage. Using this state of the art and these experiences as a starting point, the idea described in this paper is to improve such studies and develop a design support instrument in the Mediterranean context, using a framework to facilitate reading and understanding the relationship between ‘matter and architecture’ and that between ‘materials, shape and structure’ from the point of view of sustainable design.