HOSPITALS.

SUSTAINABLE PROJECT PRACTISES

Maria de Ftima Castro 1
1

Department of Engineering, University of Minho, Portugal.

The concept of sustainable development acts through diverse meanings and common activities to humanity, which has an implicit mutual goal: a society that might persist throughout many generations with a flexible and whole vision which will allow it to maintain the social and physical system that sustain it. Cities can and should be an open field to sustainable guidelines since its scale complexity becomes an impact (positive or negative) over the environment as deep as its dimension. On this scenario, construction industry wants to achieve a product that fulfills functionality requirements being at the same time profitable, safe and durable throughout its life cycle. The product must integrate itself on its environment with the smallest negative impact. These principles are leading to a sustainable construction concept, integrating many different scientific areas and research fields, in which architecture plays a main role. Sustainable architecture is the concept that describes project oriented to a social, environmental and economical equity. In the construction industry, the concept of sustainable development covers all building life cycle, since the extraction and transformation of raw materials, planning, building, usage, maintenance and demolition or deconstruction. It is noticeable the negative impact of this industry over the natural environment, so the sustainable construction must be a reality and present in all new projects. Unifying this architecture issue and the sustainable construction to the hospitals humanization brings up the question of what is a sustainable hospital and which are the best practices to create this type of buildings. Admitting this research should rellie in a common basis of evaluation allowing the sustainable building to be classified, when it comes to matters of project and construction, its guidelines to each parameter of evaluation are achieved through comparison with other similar buildings, and when possible also define the Benchmarks to each one of the categories analysed.