The Ethical Aspect vs. the Business Case of Sustainable Architecture | Live Interview with Enrico Daffonchio | South Africa

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Shades of Green 2.0 | Live Interview Series

About the Talk

What we are always faced with as architects, engineers, professionals of the built environment, in this very challenging time of global warming and wars over energy, is really the obvious ethical and scientific necessity for the building industry to move towards a more sustainable space. The main hurdle we encounter is always a financial one; “Will it cost more to create a building that is sustainable, and will the developer get a return from it?” T

his in turn dovetails into a number of questions because we start by saying there is an absolute cost, how do I reduce it as much as possible, and once I’ve reduced it, the differential between the base building and the sustainable one, how am I going to pay back the differential through savings and operational costs.

So, again this splits up into all of the various types of different technical and planning solutions that yield different answers in time, financial return and difficulty of realisation, initial capital expenditure and so on.

Today we’re going to describe two typical projects, that while being sustainable and winning awards for these achievements, have given a great return to their investors and hopefully we can inspire these conversations to galvanize more developers to this movement – besides the obvious ethical and scientific reasons for it, besides the immense return for society, there is the selfish return for the developer.

About Enrico Daffonchio:

Enrico is an Italian Architect active in South Africa and abroad, for the past 20 years, and the founder of Daffonchio Architects. The firm’s architectural approach is strongly rooted in Daffonchio’s formative years at the Politecnico di Torinoin Northern Italy, where the powerful chemistry of tradition and innovation keeps producing some of the world’s best designs. Daffonchio Architects have permanent offices in Johannesburg, Milan and Cape Town and have recently established a presence in London.

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