Self sufficient housing for thle young creatives: Crisis management of the digital entert-producers class

Human impact on the Earth is a vital contemporary issue. The intensive consumption of resources continues without introducing effective recycling processes. Buildings are responsible for a large portion of the world\´s total energy use and raw material consumption and are also responsible for around 25 % of timber harvest and 16 % of fresh water withdrawal. Urbanized areas produce 40 % of the solid waste destined for local landfills. As a collaborative practice that works on the definition of design solutions based on a cutting-edge research crossing contemporary art, society and life styles, via the identification of the very specific needs of the users, we propose in this paper a research concerning the development of a strategy for facing a situation of crisis. As a case study a double face critical point involving on the one side the condition of young people without economic resources, on the other the dissipation of energy due to the obsolete functioning of the modernist urban fabric. This research faces this crisis situation with the creative use of information technology capable of managing smart materials and digitally designed structures in order to produce beauty and avoid waste of resources. ADDITIVE is an incubator for "young creative" people who share living/working/exhibition/entertaining spaces in a light tower that can be literally "attached" to an existing building. The virtuous exchange between the new and the old building activates new socio-economical behaviours improving the residents quality of everyday life via an alternative source of energy: the human one. The ADDITIVE building is a hybrid energetically "self-sufficient" housing typology. It\´s a residential/performing mix that aims at avoiding any waste of time, energy and space, empowering with its intelligent technologies the performances of an old existing building and finally spinning off the surrounding urban area with this new beauty injection. The interest of this proposal lies in i- ts realist sustainability and how it takes maximum advantage of low-tech solutions in a context in which non other are possible. Two aspects make this proposal quiet remarkable: first, the way the design arguments relate to the larger scale, tying into an economic and social agenda. Second, for how it pursues an updated version of twentieth century housing remediation tactics. The basic idea is the negotiating and self-adjusting the different sustainability programs within a building as well as between different buildings