The Dry Walling School of Japan and Canova Association have collaborated since 2017 in organizing two dry wall construction workshops in northern Piedmont. Alongside construction site activities, participants were immersed in a system of different sectors working together to safeguard built heritage but also to re-evaluate local resources from a contemporary perspective. This multidisciplinary approach to rehabilitating traditional heritage has led to initiatives of inclusive local development, and to the promotion of a new figure, one who applies global thinking locally and who is able to grasp the potentials of a given territory.

Tacora is a village in the Chilean highlands with an extraordinary natural and cultural landscape. During the last years, its population has migrated massively to the city of Arica. In 2018, the community and the Fundación Altiplano organized a training program for the restoration of the façades of its buildings. The program employed and qualified community members in traditional building trades related to construction with earth, stone and wood. This training program opens up a horizon of new opportunities for sustainable development related to the extraordinary cultural heritage of Tacora.

A detailed analysis of the rehabilitation processes of two publicly owned buildings in Sardinia and Abruzzo is taken as a basis for describing the background, difficulties and possible future developments of raw earth as a building material in Italy. Earthen construction techniques, despite a rich tradition and extensive documentation, are still considered outdated, and their use today requires a fortunate confluence of contextual factors. Archival research, literature review and a study of manuals were coupled with an examination of urban plans and public policies, as well as interviews with experts and stakeholders. This multi-approach research shows that there is a strong need to appropriate traditional knowledge so as to translate local skills into viable solutions able to meet today’s needs. The key issue may be investment in training and dissemination. The mindset of the artisan, that of the homo faber (Sennet 2008), needs to be more widely associated with action toward sustainable local development.

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.

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