The paper shares the results of a design submitted to a competition launched by the University of Wageningen, focusing on the retrofitting action of one of the existing towers of the former Bijlmerbajes prison complex in Amsterdam. The effort of an interdisciplinary team was oriented to demonstrating that it is possible to imagine the architectonic environment as a living organism, being part of the new food production chain, sponsoring zero kilometer products and increasing buildings’ sustainable comfort while reducing their energy consumptions. Promoting a healthy lifestyle, an awareness of how to environmentally friendly behave and keeping the ecological footprint as low as possible were the main goals we wanted to achieve with our retrofitting and regenerative proposal of the GreenTower.

How the human centred design solutions will implement the benefit of daylighting in an existing primary school? This paper shows research experiences on students visual comfort inside the school building Don Milani, in Prato (Italy). The layout of training spaces, distribution and functional organization is also re-designed as flexible/resilient space/place, with a focus on the control of natural light effects for the luminous environment quality, vision and perception, but also an energy consumption reduction. The project is based on a human centred design approach, fostering the integration between sustainable lighting, human perception and biological clock (i.e. circadian rhythm) connected to the Sun daily path. Results showed the importance of natural light optimization to assure different children activities and behaviour, reorganization of the indoor environment and work/observation stations, combining the light colour variability of different materials. Findings highlighted that natural light quality assessment is fundamental to achieve not only a good lighting quality and energy consumption reduction, but also high level of visual comfort in learning spaces, implementing both the students wellbeing and their proactive behaviour, as it should be in a sustainable school building.

Focus on the role of users is the heart of the ongoing research experience in the university Living Lab environment that investigates, systematises and tests the potential of the latest digital technologies in the construction sector (BIM-sensors-Digital Twin-IoT) to define enabling building-user interfaces that support the virtuous circle of energy efficiency/environmental well-being/proactive behaviour. Synchronising the real building/virtual model allows an augmented environmental experience and new levels of user involvement. It enriches the predictive systems of data-user experience, helping to calibrate the configuration of improvement scenarios in the design/operational phase on well-being objectives, expanding the awareness of the process actors for a new centrality of the decision as an ethical value.