FROM MATERIAL PERFORMANCE TO MATERIAL CULTURE. ARCHITECTURE, PLACE AND THE ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION

For decades, sustainability in the building sector has been assessed primarily in terms of operational energy consumption during a building’s use phase. Today, however, research based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has demonstrated that embodied carbon—the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and assembly of construction materials— can make a substantial contribution to a building’s overall environmental footprint, profoundly reshaping the way architecture is conceived and designed.
The need to rethink the construction paradigm in response to the climate crisis, resource scarcity, and the increasing vulnerability of the existing building stock has led to a reinterpretation of environmental issues, no longer regarded merely as a specialised field or a regulatory constraint, but as a fundamental theoretical framework for architecture itself. Since the 1980s, this line of inquiry has evolved into an explicit critique of the model of unlimited growth that shaped twentieth-century urban and industrial development. Territory has long been reduced to a neutral physical substrate, a reservoir of raw materials and a space for consumption, while architectural design has frequently dissociated built form from the origin of resources and from its relationship with the local context. Today, attention is increasingly shifting towards the ecosystemic dimension of design, restoring to materials a relational role connected with place, productive cultures, and the memory of landscapes. In this perspective, local supply chains regain a central position within the concept of architectural quality, which can no longer be understood solely in terms of technical performance but must also encompass territorial coherence and ecosystem responsibility.
A study conducted by Asdrubali, Fronzetti Colladon, Segneri, and Gandola on more than 8,000 abstracts published between 1996 and 2022 on the relationship between Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the energy performance of buildings [2] demonstrates how, over the past two decades, LCA has profoundly transformed the assessment of architectural sustainability. The focus has shifted from an almost exclusive concern with operational energy consumption during the use phase of buildings to the consideration of embodied energy and embodied carbon—that is, the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions embedded in construction materials, manufacturing processes, transportation, construction activities, maintenance, and end-of-life operations. According to Asdrubali et al., this evolution has been marked by several pivotal milestones, including the publication of ISO 14040, which established the methodological framework for LCA; the Paris Agreement and the United Nations 2030 Agenda (2015), which recognised the need to evaluate the sustainability of the building sector through an integrated consideration of environmental, energy, and economic dimensions; and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, which further strengthened interest in indoor environmental quality, resilience, and occupants’ well-being.
Current research is progressively expanding towards the social dimension of sustainability. Nevertheless, studies applying Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) to the built environment remain relatively scarce. Likewise, the role of public policies, governance, and institutional frameworks in promoting the adoption of LCA—despite being crucial for steering the construction sector towards climate neutrality—continues to receive only limited attention within the scientific literature.