Did we Build Enough? Pleadings based on Statistics and Technologies for the Building Stock

Abstract

This contribution wants to argue for a fundamental transformative change for future development of the built environment in Austria (and generally Central Europe). Thereby, innovative technologies to update and adapt the existing building stock play a fundamental role, to improve comfort and energy performance of existing buildings and built structures. This contribution is based on a talk the author held two years ago about innovative technologies for building stock improvement in view of we built enough as a statement. When we address the existing building stock, we find buildings and structures that can be considered of high value for European cities appearance. However, an even larger fraction of existing buildings might not be considered as “beautiful” or “identification landmark” for European cities. While the replacement of the sooner would mean an immense loss of identity, the latter might in part be considered as “the ugly child”, but still provides a sink of past Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. If we would demolish and replace these buildings by new ones, huge energy consumption and GHG emissions would be the consequence, connected with the demolition, depositing of old materials, and material movements and utilisation of the new buildings, as circularity concepts in the AEC (Architecture – Engineering – Construction) – Domain are not yet well established. Cities are expanding, which can be explained by rising numbers of population, but on the other side also with a increased space consumption of inhabitants. These expanision tendencies on the one hand require extensive overwork of public infrastructure and accelerate sealing of surfaces and loss of natural resources and green-blue infrastrucutres, and on the other hand seem strange, given that we face empty built infrastructures e.g. on groundfloor level in many residential districts. Toward this end, the present contribution advocates for holistic view of the update possibilities of the building stock, while at the same time critically warns against romantification of the building stock in view of outdated perspectives of the past. Rather, research, technologies and approaches are presented and discussed that have been worked upon in the past 10–15 years and directly address the existing building stock. These efforts all tried to balance out the difficult relation between heritage protection on the one hand, and comfort and energy performance improvements on the other hand. As such, this contribution tries to utilise the concept of imperial lifestyle as critically brought up by scientistst from environmental political science and maps it on the AEC-domain.