Reflections on the Environmental Impact of ‘Vegetarian’ Buildings, and on the Reliability of Databases

This paper proposes some considerations stemming from the analysis of fourteen ecologically oriented buildings, that show different approaches to “vegetarian architecture” – a theoretical stance based on principles learnt from agriculture and nutrition. The research includes a systematic investigation of the constructional characteristics of each building, and the inventorisation of their components. The ‘cradle to gate’ embodied energy and ‘embodied carbon’ were then calculated, based on two open access databases, ICE and Ökobaudat. The comparison of the results allowed a discussion of the design solutions in terms of building form, as well as of efficient use of building materials and construction technologies. The interest in verifying whether such ‘vegetarian’ buildings have a lower environmental impact than conventional buildings led to note that at the present time there is still a lack of credible benchmarks. The sometimes disorienting discrepancy between the two databases and their change over time suggested a reflection on the databases’ assumptions and their reliability. It was also found that mainstream databases are ill-suited to calculate the impact of ‘vegetarian’ constructions, as they don’t cover organically grown, little processed building materials, which imply labour-intensive building technologies.