Architecture for Tomorrow: Towards a Sustainable Reality

Creating spaces is an act serving people. The comfort generated by those spaces is social, thermal, water, acoustic, economic, accessible, inclusive… However, contemporary architecture has lost the ability to create those spaces without resorting to excessive resource consumption, fake climate control using machines and cheap energy consumption, and embedded in an asphalt-based urban development with vehicles in mind.

Producing comfort spaces today requires the architect to embrace discomfort, unease, unfamiliarity, exploring and going against the current.

The architecture of today and of the future cannot be the architecture of the present. Our planet is undergoing too many substantial changes for the past to give us the answers for the future. We need other materials, other sizes, other relations, other limits, other requirements, and other needs.

Global emergencies such as decarbonisation, restoring biodiversity, access to decent housing, employment and local innovation, managing fresh water, poverty, equality, and the health of the oceans are some of the challenges to which architecture must respond.

Architecture cannot rely on standardising valid models across the board. Architecture must prioritise social responsibility over financial demands.

GBCE has been providing the sector with instruments for architecture to be more sustainable for over 15 years now. It works with many entities to create coherence and common sense in the development of new regulations, new ways of measuring, new financial products, more academic expertise, greater mainstreaming among the levels of the territory, city, the building and the materials. Ways are sought to help all stakeholders, each at their own speed: design, measurement and certification tools, regional and European projects facilitating co-creation and knowledge development.

The aim is to respond to the global challenges by creating a resilient society and maintaining our level of human development (health, educational, equality, inclusiveness…), but with environmental regenerative capacity.