Building between environmental boundaries, between need and choice: low-energy, frugal technologies. Learnings from vernacular solutions – a Sudanese case study

Building design needs to consider that lifetime of its products will likely face environmental and socio-economical changes, and cannot neglect the limits imposed by the geo-biosphere – which is at the same time provider of resources and tank for the waste of our economies. Taking action to face such limits beyond trendy, debatable “green-washing” policies can be either a forward-looking choice or rather something imposed by necessity. The latter is the premise – for instance – of an Italian collaboration between humanitarian NGO Emergency Onlus and architecture studio TAMassociati in designing hospitals in the African regions of Sahara and Sahel: according to Pantaleo & Strada (2011), many African countries – with their ability to live together with scarcity – represent an example, an opportunity to meditate on some alternative to the mainstream development model, time to time reinventing the thigs. Vernacular building techniques are revisited towards a low-tech innovation that, in a next future, could turn out to be useful also for Western architecture. Some traditional solutions from Sudan and other Countries are here reviewed under a systemic point of view, and presented with the evaluation of their potential advantages in terms of long-term socio-environmental sustainability.