"Build more durably, more densely and, above all, less!" the architect and historian Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani calls out to us.
Sustainable building is on everyone's lips. Most proposals are aimed at short-sighted measures such as the installation of insulation panels (called "mummery fundamentalism" by Lampugnani) or the outlawing of concrete. But in order to create sustainable housing in high-quality houses in the long term, far more differentiated and comprehensive considerations are needed.
Lampugnani sketches a brief history of urban and architectural consumerism and builds on it his reflections on a culture of substantial sustainability. He writes against the eradication of nature through urban sprawl and pleads for a strategy of density: only the compact city can be ecological.
In order to reduce the immense material and energy consumption of the building industry, he calls for a rigorous turnaround: turning away from the development of further building land and the unrestrained consumption of raw materials. Not demolish and build anew, but rebuild, deconstruct, continue to build. The longer a building lives, the more ecological it is.