Frontiers of Green Architecture / Frontierele arhitecturii „green“

Designing in an ecologically responsible manner requires a fundamentally different perspective on our relationships and our position in the natural environment; it is necessary to start from the limits of current sciences and the social, political and economical context that implicitly acknowledge human activities as dominant over an essentially independent nature. The awareness of the complexity of projects and the intricacy of the construction systems available nowadays, in combination with the functional and formal relationships established between spaces and components, dealing with the updating and innovation of techniques, with the needs of comfort, usability and security, is fully expressed through the issues of environmental sustainability. Architecture can make this truth obvious and it can allow us to express it at a deeper level (Van der Ryn, 2005). Through the analysis of the architectural elements, construction techniques and landscape integration, while underlining the importance of green in accordance with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for Agenda 2030 (United Nations, 2015), the paper brings out new perspectives and strategies useful to support new lifestyles that aim at improving the quality of the environment and reducing the impact on resource consumption, focusing not only on green intended as vegetation, but also on a more complex significance of sustainability, since ecological design requires attention and understanding of the environment as a functioning natural system. It is compulsory to apprehend the relation between natural and artificial, between people and technologies, in order to evolve and reveal the possibilities that the present world offers with respect to the environment. New tools of ecological design need to be defined in order to configure self-adaptive organisms that can be applied at various scales, from the urban one until that of architectural components.