Sustainability: Principle at the base of the engineer's formation

What today is considered as innovation, will become of routine in 2020. Therefore, there is the need to teach the future engineers to conceive and plan sustainable buildings. Sustainability must consider the following multiple aspects: energetic efficiency, the possibility of planning buildings to zero consumption, the sustainable use of renewable and not renewable resources, their recycle and the use of products deriving from other productive cycles and reusable for the creation of the building itself. For such aim it is necessary to introduce in the basic formation of the engineering planning student a multidisciplinary planning approach. This work is based on the results of a bioclimatic planning research carried out by the authors in communion with their own didactic experience in the course of Technical Architecture for Building Engineering-Architecture engineers. This work pinpoints the criteria and the contents that must be followed and introduced in the students’ formative curricula, with the purpose of obtaining a designer able to plan and realize sustainable buildings. In the light of didactic experiences acquired in developing countries, this work also pays attention to the specific criteria that must be kept under consideration for the formation of engineers that will operate in such contexts.