MODELLING FOR PROJECT DESIGN: INSTRUMENTS FOR SUSTAINABLE AND INTEGRATED DESIGN

The universal building style starts to reveal its limits. It is essential to approach the design by combining architecture with local conditions – social, economical, climatic-. This concept is especially fundamental in temperate climatic contexts and in Mediterranean areas, where conditioning electrics consumption is growing really fast. These new requirements refer to the need of developing new instruments and methodologies for re-integrating in design practice, using contemporary technological knowledge, climate issues. Moreover, nowadays design choices have to be optimized by introducing temporal variables interrelated with both energetic issues and LCA.
A possible solution to this growing complexity arrives from innovative computer based methodologies for design. These are able to move the concept of model, which is the essence of the project itself, at the core of the design action.
Moreover, in a smart design vision the modelling approach could represent a way of thinking able to dynamically interact with environmental and technological needs and requirements using the connection between real and virtual worlds since the early design phases. This meets the need in rationalization of design processes starting from the preliminary design, which has been defined since 90’s (De Paoli, 2005).
Roberto Palumbo (1998) illustrates the possibility to identify an internal space, inside of the processes described by the Merloni law (on that time not already promulgated), «in where customers are finally driven to declare their role and competence». According to Palumbo, every stakeholder has to have specific responsibilities inside the process by specific instruments of control and programming that have to be focalized since the Preliminary stage of the project. This idea includes inside the design process every possible innovation both on the organization of the demand side and on the technical drawing side. We propose an essay on innovative possibilities of processes’ control that are driven by the new computer based platform approach.