Standard housing: economic concepts and future research in Portugal

Globalization, competitiveness and the current world economy require an increasing capacity to fulfill ever rising levels of excellence and demand. Faced with such challenge, Construction has to strive for constant improvement in its quality, optimizing the cost/benefit relation with fairness and justice, safeguarding both the comfort and the dignity of the users in the context of cultural values and local resources. Architecture has to provide quality of design with technically adequate materials and constructive solutions, innovative or re-interpretative, mostly local, despite budget limitations (considered on a life-cycle analysis). However, if the economy of the planning and building process is an essential concept nowadays, it should not be confused with cheap building. This paper recalls the necessity of developing new operative approaches that combine quality of construction, optimal cost/benefit relation and careful architectural design, regarding an effectively response to the needs of contemporary Portuguese society, considering international experiences and the ongoing discussion of urban and environmental topics. Price and quality being two different parameters, what does cost awareness means? An understanding of the political and economical context in Portugal after the 1974 Revolution is needed in order to overview how the building process has evolved, as well as to identify the current characteristics of standard construction. A large number of constructions have been built in the 1980s and 1990s, most of all made without a sustainable cost/benefit ratio despite initial budget limitations. Nowadays, cost pressures and quality constraints (especially new Energetic Certification requirements, following the directive 2002/91/CE), are leading to marked changes in building production in developed countries in Europe. What is proposed in this paper is to present a cost-effectiveness parameter that can help to characterize the current standard construction in Portugal, indispensable for the identification of the available possibilities for improvement, through a life-cycle analysis.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT