The Sustainability Box: Building Green Futures by Mario Cucinella Architects

The Consulate of Italy in Perth together with Curtin University have brought to Perth Design Week an exhibition on sustainability by renowned Italian architect Mario Cucinella. On show now at Central Park Perth.

MCA_Mario Cucinella Architects has created a travelling mixed-media exhibition, “The Sustainability Box”, that is embarking on an international journey, with a message on the fundamental importance of sustainable architecture.

The transportable installation package, “The Sustainability Box” by MC A is the result of an extraordinary collaboration between the studio’s designers, modelers, and architects, designed  around the concept of a message in a bottle, able to travel across continents to instigate critical debate around sustainable architecture.

Once opened, the box will turn into a 360-degree, integrated modular installation, constructed from 92 carefully sculpted recycled wooden card components, and measuring 10x3m. The installation will display MC A projects that integrate technology, climate adaptation and environmental strategies, including zero emission buildings, passive design and bioclimatic solutions, as well as projects that contribute to urban regeneration and social change. It will also illustrate the practice’s use of parametric modeling and environmental simulations.

“There is a clear division between ambitions and reality when it comes to Sustainability.

This is because of today’s specific historical situation: we come after a great industrial transformation which has furthered, on the one hand, technology, development and a better quality of life, but which has taken a toll on the environment and society with severe consequences in terms of survival on our planet.

As it happens, when things degenerate they do so at the expense of somebody, and in this case, it is the environment that starts complaining through climate changes.

This also applies to people’s fundamental rights, within the social conquests of that poorly represented part of society that decides to raise its voice through the web and  humanitarian associations.

Sustainability, as we envision it, should answer to all of this, and it should, therefore, be based on  networks and relations with citizens, and not only on financial plans.  Envisioning sustainable buildings means opening a close relationship with the place and its climate.

Let us imagine and rethink buildings where the link between architecture and engineering is not only  a technological but a genetic one. In the form, in materials and no longer only in machines.

We must imagine low tech buildings to put at work forms and materials,  which are now changing to become agents in the result, materials which carry out an invisible work,  a function, and can be part of a new circular economy.

This process seems to me a step closer to nature’s complexity rather than to that  of mechanical artifice.

Buildings with a high degree of empathy, a Creative Empathy.”

Mario Cucinella

Details

The Sustainability Box: Building Green Futures Exhibition
Architecture and design by Mario Cucinella Architects

Open now until 4 April
8.30am-5.00pm weekdays
Central Park Perth