The 11th Barbara Cappochin International Architecture Biennial, which Zintek attended as an official partner, was held on 7 and 8 June.
The two-day event began on Friday 7 June with a conference in the Aula Magna of the Palazzo del Bo in Padua entitled “Human Life and the Future of the Planet: One Health, Landscape, and 15-Minute Cities”.
The world-renowned experts in attendance included Carlos Moreno, associate professor at IAE Paris – Sorbonne University, who introduced his “15-minute city” model. According to Professor Moreno, the 15-minute city is “a social urban concept that seeks to reduce the number of essential journeys people make by offering more local services, in an increasingly interconnected world”. It has the potential to “generate new business opportunities, work, cultural spaces, and social activities and increase people’s productive time” as well as offering “new options in our response to climate change”.
Andrea Rinaldo, full professor of hydraulic construction at the University of Padua and the winner of the Stockholm Water Prize 2023 — often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Water — also discussed climate change. Stressing the lack of “collective awareness of the fact that the climate is changing more quickly now than it ever has in the planet’s history, and the need for us to do the same”, Professor Rinaldo argued that “we must rethink the distributive justice of water resources management, including as a powerful tool for reducing inequality at a global scale”.
Giovanni Maria Flick, president emeritus of the Constitutional Court of Italy, gave a well-received speech entitled “The Right to Health, Landscape and the City in the Italian Constitution”. Professor Flick used the recent reform of articles 9 and 14 of the constitution as a way of introducing a vision of the city as an “essential social creation for the development of the human self”, an asset that offers equal dignity to all citizens and promotes sustainable development “by balancing environmental protection with technological progress”.
Matteo Colleoni, full professor of environmental and territorial sociology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, made several tangible proposals in this area. His talk on policies regarding energy efficiency in buildings and decarbonization focused in particular on reducing energy demand for heating and cooling. He advocated adopting suitable building envelope and ventilation solutions that consider the full building cycle and use non-climate-altering materials; music to our ears here at Zintek, as our work has been dedicated to these exact goals for many years.
Overall, the event emphasized the importance of the “One Health” concept: an integrated approach to public health and urban renewal which, according to the Italian National Institute of Health’s definition, recognizes the inseparable bond between the health of humans, animals, and the ecosystem.
Saturday 8 June was prizegiving day: after the winners were unveiled at the San Gaetano Cultural Centre in Padua, all guests were invited to visit the Laboratorio Morseletto, the headquarters of the firm of the same name renowned for its stone, marble, and granite work. The day concluded with everyone in high spirits at the Biennial’s award ceremony. This fun and sociable occasion was held in the magnificent Villa Almerico Capra in Vicenza, better known as La Rotonda, a masterpiece of Palladian architecture and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994.
