Colombia. The Colombian architect Simón Hosie was one of the speakers at ConstruVerde Colombia 2015, the International Forum and Expo on sustainable design and construction organized by the Colombian Council for Sustainable Construction (CCCS), which was held last Wednesday, September 9 and Thursday, September 10. Hosie won the National Architecture Award and in 2014 the Colombian Society of Architects awarded him the recognition of sustainability for his work focused on projects that integrate traditional materials and new technologies.
Hosie spoke with ConstruVerde organizers about different aspects of her work, as well as her vision for sustainability. First, this architect spoke about his "Planos Vivos" initiative, a program implemented by the National Agency against Extreme Poverty (ANSPE).
"In this model we introduced a new way of subdividing the territory to develop projects coherent with the environment, because after all the political divisions are abstract, they are limits defined by historical situations of various kinds that hinder the implementation of guidelines, guides and regulations adjusted to the characteristics of each place. In this way we propose a new way of understanding the country by regions, associating it with areas that maintain similar climatic, geographical, environmental and cultural characteristics, places that share common factors associated with environmental and cultural nature, which will enable the introduction of norms and laws related to their characteristics, "explained the architect.
Regarding the issue of sustainability, the interviewee also pointed out that "underlying sustainability depends on an increasingly educated consumer, since the only way to redirect the economic machinery is to relate profits to ecological/humanitarian processes and practices and, that would only be given by the demand of an increasingly demanding public".
He added that "I believe that building standards do not include the wide variety of materials with construction potential that exist in our country. For example, although materials such as guadua or earth were included in the Sismoresistant Code, they are not detailed and robust enough for application in projects regulated by public bodies. This forces us to complement the memories and calculations with laboratory and resistance tests, which are expensive and wasteful, and ends up limiting their use to informal constructions and favoring the use of industrial materials as the only alternative for the construction of housing and infrastructure projects. "
"Nothing takes us further away from sustainability than the impossibility of understanding regions holistically and approaching them with an interdisciplinary approach," Hosie concluded.
