Local Tradition and Bioclimatic Architecture in the Italian Alpine Region

ABSTRACT: Nowadays, deep and sudden climate changes are occurring, and the human actions are considered to be widely jointly liable. Such events are connected most of all to the building sector where a reversal of trend is now on going with difficulty, by means of the introduction of design, constructive and management methodologies more respectful of the environment and the use of local climatic sources in order to save energy and to guarantee better comfort conditions for the users: the so called bioclimatic architecture. Anyway, designing following sustainable criteria does not regard only the energy field but even the cultural one, because it means to make up buildings whose characteristics should depend even on the pre-existing situation from a typological, formal and material point of view. Sustainable design, in fact, is often capable of introducing a new self-referential building typology, surely well recognizable and identifiable in the urban context because of its originality but often in contrast with the surroundings. Up to the introduction of “unsustainable” building types that do not interact but deny the local building tradition. This paper refers of a research carried out at the Laboratory of Building Design of the University of Trento whose main goal is to classify and to critical analyse recent sustainable buildings in the Italian alpine region in order to verify the congruence of new typologies and new materials with the local culture and tradition