José María de Cárdenas closes the 3rd Meeting on Energy Saving and Sustainable Construction in Seville
EDDEA founding partner José María de Cárdenas gave the closing address at the 3rd Meeting on Energy Saving and Sustainable Construction (Efisur), which brought together a range of experts to examine the keys to the transition towards a more efficient model in the building sector – a sector responsible for 23% of final energy consumption and 30% of carbon dioxide emissions in Spanish cities.
In his address, he observed that “today, the level of energy consumption determines the quality of any product, be it a car or a home”. He argued that thinking about a building’s efficiency means weighing up numerous factors, and maintained that sustainable construction is neither a passing fashion nor a constraint, but “a great opportunity to improve design”.
The Seville architect began by describing the profound change that residential construction has undergone in recent years. Before the crisis, a whole range of players gathered around any given project (from the developer to the lending bank), and demand absorbed almost everything.
“Today the major buildings are being delivered by large development groups, with highly trained technical teams and the backing of international investment funds,” he noted. All this at a time when demand comes from “expert clients” with very high expectations. In this climate, the model of a firm such as EDDEA, with a team of more than 40 people, has emerged stronger.
A global challenge
De Cárdenas went on to unpack the global challenge on which part of his work has focused: the rapid movement of people from the countryside to the city in Asia, Africa and Latin America, which is placing enormous pressure on urban centres and “must be resolved with the same sustainability criteria already established in the most developed economies”.
The scale of the challenge can be summed up in a few figures: “In 1900 only 10% of humanity lived in large urban centres; by 2010, with 7.5 billion inhabitants, it was already 50%; in the coming years the share will reach 75% of a population of 9 billion people.”
José María de Cárdenas led the creation of Atlántica, in alliance with the industrial engineering company Ghenova and the real estate group Galia – “a technology platform that integrates different software tools and covers every phase of the design process, including both costs and scheduling”.
A ‘Spanish Quarter’ in Moscow
This technology has already produced tangible results in Moscow, where the first district of 5,200 homes (in whose design Atlántica is involved) is nearing completion – a district that is, in fact, known as “the Spanish Quarter”.
“Although construction later required changes because the initial budget was cut, the whole strategy of our project is embodied there: in the public spaces and in the configuration of the buildings, with blocks that form enclosed courtyards – an innovation in Russia; the green areas and the commercial spaces have been respected… the essence of our project is there,” he said.
The next challenge lies in Nairobi (Kenya), where he is involved in designing an extension of thousands of homes in a new city called Tatu City. “Part of the planning has to be adapted to the climate, but in essence the design process is the same,” he explained.
In initiatives of this kind, the challenge is to ensure that a quality 130-square-metre home costs no more than $120.00, “which is what a family earning 1,000 euros a month can afford if it puts a third of that income towards the mortgage”. As the architect stressed, the target market is the emerging middle class: civil servants and qualified professionals.
Urban planning
“In urban planning, Atlántica designs neighbourhoods as if they were a computer’s motherboard, since other elements can be plugged in later, or provision can be made for projects that will arrive further down the line… This used to be done in a very fragmented way,” said De Cárdenas.
Planning the cities of the future is a business worth billions. “Russia has launched a competition to design its social housing model for the coming decades; Morocco has launched a competition to remodel its fifteen largest cities… There will be many such initiatives around the world,” he emphasised.
And the competitors will not be the usual ones. “Google has set up a laboratory to design the cities of the future and has already won competitions; that will be our competition too,” he warned.
The 3rd Meeting on Energy Saving and Sustainable Construction addressed issues such as new materials and technologies to cut a building’s energy bill, the work needed on the building stock dating from before the 1980s, and the infrastructure required to improve sustainable mobility in cities.
The event was structured around four round tables organised by the Official Association of Quantity Surveyors and Technical Architects of Seville (Colegio Oficial de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Técnicos de Sevilla) and the newspaper ABC, with sponsorship from Gas Natural Andalucía, MP Ascensores and Renault.