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(W.E. Talk) Green architecture: building bridges between the East and West, without crossing the limits of our planet_我的网站

A |     By Anna Dalla Valle    (CNS)-- Forward-looking mindset: whole-system and life cycle thinking    My work is centred on the environmental sustainability of buildings over the entire life cycle and beyond in view of the circular economy: from design and construction to use and reuse, up to final disposal or, preferably, recovery for a second life. Here, the paradigm shift is twofold, because a whole-system thinking is needed not only to consider the entire life cycle, but also to envision what happens next. The ultimate goal is to minimize environmental impacts and to drive both sustainability and innovation.    To be more explicit, the first shift involves keeping in mind the entire life cycle – from the early design stages – moving beyond the traditional focus on construction and energy efficiency during use. It is to select building products looking back to the supply chain, such as recycled content, locally sourced and bio-based solutions, while also looking ahead to performance decay, maintenance needs and the potential for extending service life. Moreover, the second shift press to move beyond the linear building process – as traditionally practiced – in which we extract raw materials, we build, we use, and eventually we demolish. Indeed, this model has reached its limits, undermining planetary resources with adverse environmental and social effects.    Interconnected choices: designing decisions that create shared value    A life cycle perspective matched with circularity inevitably challenges this linearity, wondering from the very beginning about what happens when assets become obsolete and fall into disuse, to design buildings as part of a continuous loop of resources. Accordingly, design, construction, daily use (energy and water consumption), maintenance, replacement and end-of-life turn out to be regarded not as isolated steps but interconnected with each other. In fact, at each stage, choices can either preserve or destroy value.    For example, if construction solutions are carefully selected, they can be reused in the future, either in their entirety, as whole products, or through disassembly into components, or even by separating materials. In this way, they may maintain the same function (e.g. a window reused as it is) or serve different purposes (e.g. glass cullet used as input for glass wool insulation). If technological systems are designed flexibly, buildings can reach different business segments and host concurrently different activities, resulting easily adaptable from housing to office and vice versa, instead of being demolished. If building processes integrate digital tools, data can guide smarter decisions over decades, provided that data infrastructure is ensured, followed by constant monitoring and analysis of the collected data and the update and dissemination of results across industry and practitioners as well as policymakers.    Thinking this way means making choices future-oriented, ready to embrace innovation while respecting planetary boundaries, namely limiting the environmental impact at every stage and in every region – to avoid burden shifting – not just at the beginning but along the whole (first-second) life cycle. Certainly, a demanding but exciting challenge: one I am proud to take on and in my little to contribute to.    Beyond appearances: close-up process for understanding what lies behind    In daily life, we often say to "look beyond appearances". Usually, this expression pertains to people, to underline the risk of avoiding judging someone solely by what can be seen. Now the interesting thing is that the same advice can be applied to architecture, obviously without undermining the importance of aesthetic beauty, at the core also of the New European Bauhaus initiative together with sustainability and inclusion. Nonetheless, as an architect expert in sustainable technology, I have learned to extend it to the built environment, by seeing buildings not merely as visible structures (walls, roofs, windows), but as living parts of a larger and complex system. In this sense, architecture can be compared to a plant. Plants are anchored in the soil by roots; buildings are anchored in the ground by foundations. Plants capture sunlight, absorb water, accommodate small animals, and interact with other organisms; buildings consume energy, deplete water, host human life, and interact with their surroundings. Both are deeply connected to their ecosystem.    However, to fully understand them, both must be looked beyond appearances, through a "close-up" process taken to the extreme. It is not simply a matter of focusing on details, as happens in photography and cinema fields; the intention is to delve deeper and deeper to the fuller extent: an in-depth analysis of whatever is behind, starting from the exterior to gradually shift to construction technologies, materials, up to their chemicals. The latter is, of course, not the responsibility of architects, but it lies at the heart of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), analyses that I usually perform during the decision-making at the different process stage to help building stakeholders minimize environmental impacts across the entire – potentially multiple – life cycle.    For architectural technology, for example, it is a matter of addressing, alongside conventional requirements (e.g. performance, safety, usability, well-being), the specific requirements of environmental sustainability (e.g. the rational use and optimization of materials, energy, water), taking into account the technical feasibility and evaluating the entire life cycle. At the utmost, it is to look into everything that underlies the presence of that specific material in that exact spot, its behaviour and interrelationships when in service, and its post-use journey, setting up the necessary network to actually close the loop in practice.    Material-immaterial synergy: the invisible foundations of sustainable architecture    To embrace this vision, the idea of resources is to be extended compared to the ordinary sense. Certainly, buildings are made and calls for a set of tangible resources, such as money to be started, bricks, steel, or timber to be erected, tools and equipment to be managed including in the long-term. The issue that often runs out is that buildings rely heavily as well on intangible resources, namely knowledge, skills, processes, organisation, information flows and network. These two dimensions – tangible and intangible – are closely connected and interdependent on each other. Without appropriate eco-design knowledge, even the best materials are wasted; without materials, knowledge has no application.    In such a mindset, architecture becomes a remarkable expression of the synergy between tangible resources and intangible resources: a space where East and West can successfully meet, building a bridge across cultures through openness and inclusiveness. Indeed, it is well recognized that different traditions bring different perspectives and, when combined, generate the best and more holistic solutions. The "living building" is both a technical and cultural artefact, an expression of human creativity that must not overstep the planetary boundary.    Strategic imperative: cross-border and cross-disciplinary cooperation    Evidence is found in international collaborations such as Joint Schools, where universities from different countries join forces to promote shared research and training. A concrete example of Sino-foreign cooperation is the XJTU-POLIMI Joint School, opened in Xi'an (China) in 2019 through a partnership between Politecnico di Milano and Xi'an Jiaotong University. As POLIMI's first campus outside Italy, it serves as an international platform dedicated to education and research as well as technology transfer and business incubation. This initiative, like others currently in place, aims to take the best of each part to foster shared growth and mutual learning. Italy brings its strong polytechnic culture, its multidisciplinary approach and focus on design quality, together with the European emphasis on social and environmental responsibility. China, in turn, is a leader in fast-evolving business, in the integration capacity of digital technologies and in large-scale engineering projects, pulled by top-down policies that allow fast implementation. In conjunction, these strengths can create fertile ground for innovation and speed up the transformation process within the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector, always been acknowledged as resistant to change, due to its intrinsic complexity and fragmented nature.    Rethinking the built environment: buildings as resource-driven assets    The effort is to move beyond the concept of buildings as "material banks" – namely repositories where resources are temporarily stored – to rethink them and push the vision further of buildings as "resource-driven assets". While the first construct is earmarked for physical goods, that proposed calls for careful consideration of both tangible/material/visible resources and intangible/immaterial/invisible resources, taking care that everything is optimised and nothing is wasted, to preserve their value over time.    In practice, this means looking at what goes into buildings, such as materials, systems and the energy required to transform and assemble them, but also, for instance, the set of expertise, skills and specialization of practitioners involved during design. Similarly, starting from the outset, it means looking at what comes out throughout buildings life, like emissions, waste, and decommissioned materials, but also knowledge gained from monitoring and lessons learned from operations. To ignore either side of the equation (inputs-outputs) would be a missed opportunity. If we want buildings to truly act as resource-driven assets, we must synergise, map, understand, and manage the full spectrum of in- and out- flows, both tangible and intangible.    On the tangible side, this requires a deep understanding of material, energy and water flows across the entire life cycle. Which resources are extracted, transported, and assembled? How much energy is consumed, and how is it sourced? How do materials degrade over time, and how can they be reused or recycled without losing quality? These questions are essential to reduce impacts and to design systems that are both efficient and resilient.    On the intangible side, equally important are the flows of information and knowledge that connect all actors in the construction value chain. Long before a building is erected, crucial questions are: How is data exchanged among stakeholders? Is communication efficient enough to speed up the workflows? How can design capabilities evolve into maturity, meaning quality achieved through best practice? Then, as more buildings themselves add to this immaterial layer through sensors, smart meters, and digital platforms that produce valuable insights, another set of questions follows: How is this information managed, shared, and preserved? How to ensure that data supports predictive maintenance and reverse logistics? How to activate new business models based on sharing and collaboration? Just as materials should not be wasted, neither should information. Data and knowledge must be treated as resources that enrich our collective know-how, building an "infodump bank" that not only improves current performance but also informs future decisions, guides new designs and strengthens subsequent projects.    The correlation between tangible and intangible resources is ever closer: managing them together ensures that nothing is wasted and that the embedded value is preserved across time. In that respect, "no waste of resources" also means "no waste of value", since every material, every bit of data, and every piece of knowledge carries potential that, if carefully handled, can extend usefulness, inspire innovation, and create lasting benefits well beyond the life of a single project.    Global impact: construction sector as global lever for planetary sustainability    Through joint research and cross-border exchange programmes, the construction sector proves to be an extraordinary testing ground and given its global impact in terms of emissions and resource consumption, it clearly stands as a priority for change. Furthermore, never forget that buildings are everywhere and shape our daily lives, leading mindful planning crucial not only for preserving the natural environment but also human well-being.    In this framework, architects, engineers, designers, scientists and all necessary professionals can work side by side to explore new possibilities, even creating new synergies across key business sectors. Imagine if constructions integrate materials from unexpected sources such as fashion and/or food waste. Fast-fashion clothing and textile scraps, invasive plants and agricultural by-products, or even organic waste – which are currently a significant environmental burden with serious social effects – can be rethought as valuable inputs for new building solutions. In this way, the concept of waste disappears, as it serves as input resources from another industrial sector, consequently, contributing to lower material intensity (virgin material reduction), greater industrial symbiosis (new business opportunities), and implementing smarter ways to manage resources.    At the same time, digital technologies and artificial intelligence can support this process, helping to track resources, optimise flows, and potentially update in real-time the expected environmental impacts in relation to what actually happens. The ambition is to create architecture that is resource efficient and socially valuable in the long term. Considering the key role of construction, even small changes, when scale up to thousands of buildings and millions of people, can make a big difference for the planet.    At this point, the key role of China is beyond question. As the world's largest construction market and major exporter, its choices strongly affect global trends, making environmental awareness and transparency in its building sector essential. Indeed, in a globalised economy, what is produced in one region may be assembled in another, used in a third and so on throughout the different stages of the life cycle, spreading responsibilities across several borders. For this reason, it is imperative to turn LCA into a standard practice, but also to regionalise results, to identify where the greatest impacts occur over the building life cycle, including in geographical terms. Here, China inevitably results in a central hotspot to concentrate efforts: improving practices there could deliver benefits worldwide, setting the chance to become an outstanding reference and reducing burdens far beyond its borders, (hopefully) without exceeding the limits of the planet.    Yet – be warned – the focus is not solely on new construction, where starting from scratch makes everything easier: the real challenge (and greatest opportunity) stands in the existing building stock, because of representing the largest reserve of resources we already have. These artefacts embody vast amounts of materials, energy, and human effort that should not be wasted leaving unfinished and/or uninhabited. Instead of discarding them, we must be proactive to renew the existing buildings, extending their service life while improving performance to meet ever-evolving needs.    Call to action: building bridges within planetary boundaries    It is time to join forces, to move from theory to practice, from words to action. To succeed, we need lots more than technology. We need dialogue between cultures; we need young and open minds, trained to think across disciplines and borders, ready to learn from diversity, capable of working together toward a unified vision, think globally while acting locally. Green architecture should not be perceived as a trend, but as a common responsibility of the present for the future.    These are just the premises to the most open question ever: "What if we built bridges between East and West, without crossing the limits of our planet?" I therefore invite everyone to begin offering practical responses, reframing global challenges as shared opportunities for innovation.    Profile:        Anna Dalla Valle is an Assistant Professor and Researcher in the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering (DABC) at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. She is an associate and active member of both the Italian LCA Network Association and the Italian Society of Architectural Technology. She represents Politecnico di Milano in the New European Bauhaus initiative and fully participates in various international organizations, including the LCA Working Group of the Italian Green Building Council, the Italian Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform, and the International Energy Agency’s working group on ' Ways to Implement Net-zero Whole Life Carbon Buildings'.                    。    《绿灯侠》（Lanterns）第二集已经播出，粉丝们认为其中隐藏着一名残暴的绿灯侠反派。

B | 警告！下文包含《绿灯侠》第一季第二集的剧透。内布拉斯加州拉什维尔出现了地外活动，哈尔·乔丹（Kyle Chandler 饰）决心查明真相。正当他计划将尸体运出停尸房并穿过小镇时，约翰·斯图尔特（Aaron Pierre 饰）被派去取回一个巨大的绿色电池并保护他的“小鸟”。

C | 这位实习绿灯侠还没走多远就遭到伏击并被绑架，对方要求与他谈谈据说是地球面临的新威胁：猎人者（Manhunters）。观众在此见到了由 Paul Ben-Victor 饰演的 Antaan，他是一群外星人的领袖，旨在铲除躲藏在拉什维尔的猎人者。

D | 他威胁说如果约翰不能在 48 小时内揭露猎人者的身份，他将夷平整个小镇。

E | 但一些粉丝怀疑，我们已经遇到了绿灯军团历史上最臭名昭著的超级反派之一。在与约翰会面时，Antaan 声称猎人者负责消灭了他的族人，甚至强行将这些暴行投射到约翰的脑海中。巧合的是，这段背景故事与红灯侠及其愤怒的外星反派阿托希塔斯（Atrocitus）有很多共同点。红灯侠的早期版本也曾遭受过猎人者的毒手。粉丝们在寻找 Antaan 与 DC 宇宙的其他联系时，阿托希塔斯似乎是最合理的解释。绿灯侠使用“意志”构建造物，黄灯侠使用“恐惧”，而红灯侠则由“愤怒”驱动，这可能为哈尔和约翰在剧集推进过程中提供了一个复仇心切的对手。考虑到阿托希塔斯通常比 Ben-Victor 饰演的角色看起来更庞大、更凶狠，这些松散的联系可能还不足以让你确信另一位经典的 DC 反派将继塞尼斯托（Sinestro）之后加入最新的真人版 DC 宇宙（DCU）。然而，粉丝们并没有放弃。

F | 当有报道称 Ben-Victor 将加入《绿灯侠》剧组时，将其角色描述为“一个致力于揭露真相并向伤害其族人的人复仇的外星人。

G | 他被对法律深切而持久的仇恨所吞噬，决心以自己的方式伸张正义。”这听起来确实更像我们在漫画中认识的阿托希塔斯。考虑到《绿灯侠》已经将世界设定为充满可以隐瞒身份的外星人，这位红灯侠领袖拥有自己的伪装并非没有可能。

H | 与此同时，第二集并不是阿托希塔斯理论第一次在网上出现。上周，Reddit 用户已经将以数字 6 结尾的年份发生的重大事件与 666 扇区联系起来。当时这看起来像是牵强附会，但随着线索的汇集，这最终可能成为对未来剧情的伏笔。“可能就是阿托希塔斯，他提到的屠杀大概就是 666 扇区的大屠杀，”另一位粉丝建议道。“Paul Ben-Victor 的角色绝对是阿托希塔斯，”另一位推测道。

I | “在漫画中，是猎人者消灭了阿托希塔斯的星球，包括他的家人。他在这里的谈话方式与此完全吻合，就像他亲身经历过一样。”随着《绿灯侠》剧情的展开，很难说它在第一季会引入多少深受粉丝喜爱的角色。目前我们只知道，哈尔·乔丹似乎会在八集结束前的某个时刻遭遇不幸。而约翰·斯图尔特在 DCU 中似乎有着光明的前景，因为 Aaron Pierre 已确认将出演《超人》续集《明日之子》（Man of Tomorrow）。在等待第三集播出的同时，你可以查看相关剧评和剧情回顾，并了解制片人 Chris Mundy 的看法。

J | 此外，DC 影业联合 CEO 也对 DCU 不断演变的基调进行了回应。

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Published on:07:06:05