Smart buildings and connections, a case study for India

This abstract reports about an architectural research about material and immaterial networks, when some small and smart buildings are intended as the basic regenerative cells of smart cities, a hi-tech key element allowing them to evolve towards the model of a clever and connected infrastructural grid. This is the objective that has animated the activity of a team including the author and formed in the framework of an advanced design course experience within the Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP - High Polytechnic School, jointly organized by the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin) to define the virtual connections generated by a small building: a sustainable, energy independent clinic conceived for bringing basic health care services into poor and overpopulated developing contexts, like slums around high-density cities. The idea underlying the whole research is that to speed the improvement of socially disadvantaged micro-contexts, implants of mostly cheap energy and clean, cheap water, condensed in a few, small smart-tech “hubs”, can play a fundamental role in activating a virtuous interplay between economic competitiveness and environmental healthiness; and that this can in turn contribute to lower the barriers between city slums and their surroundings. Smart cities, smart buildings, sustainable architecture, energy, models and images of representation, material and immaterial connections.