Matéria e Sustentabilidade na Arquitetura Contemporânea: o betão e a madeira

Abstract

The current environmental scenario is not at all encouraging. The worsening of global warming is directly related to the accelerated pace of production and industrial systems. The Industrial Revolution, and with it the hyper-artificialization of construction materials, simultaneously originated the synthetic product and demand, among which we can mention steel, concrete and polymers. This new landscape and the new socio-cultural guidelines quickly assimilated the new consumer goods and contributed to the gap between materials and the creative process. This work points out some concepts such as critical regionalism, sustainable design, stereotomy and tectonics in an attempt to provide a new perspective on natural materials and, from them, mitigate the environmental impacts of construction. This, however, understanding that within the current scenario, materials such as concrete are extremely important for the maintenance of most of the systems that keep our society running. It is considered, therefore, the need to explore alternatives that gather favorable qualities so that materials such as reinforced concrete continue to be part of the current constructive dialectic without breaking with the proposal of sustainability. On the other hand, wood has always been a constructive material of excellence, despite being displaced by more "technological" materials, its ecological performance, its belonging to the building tradition and its versatility reinforce its value today. This value is apprehended through the reinvention conquered by this material from technologies that allowed to raise its properties to another level. The present work proposes to explore an analysis system known as life cycle assessment to understand the parameters of sustainability in buildings and some aspects of the ecology of concrete and wood. Relying on projects developed in Portugal, the aim is to demonstrate the aesthetic, constructive and environmental potential of these two materials from a national perspective.