The sustainable house: psychology vs technology

In this Digital Era (Industry 4.0) characterised by a great number of IT innovations, the questions are: which changes will there be in our future daily home life? Which kind of house will be appropriate to help us to find a balanced relationship between virtual spaces and physical ones? That is, between our mind (more and more supported by information technology) and our body (that ancestrally needs to feel well in contact with Nature)? This contribution aims to underline the natural and human characteristics that can inspire architects during their composition processes of a sustainable house. We are often used to thinking about a sustainable house only as a passive house. We care about the technological components and we rarely care about the psychological ones, that have to be connected with the context where the house will be built, so in a city we have to find the correct network of relationships between domestic spaces and urban ones. Only a progressive transition from public spaces to private ones can offer the inhabitants a sense of urban well-being and identity. The concepts of “in-between” and “thresholds” have been abundantly studied in the past by famous authors of architectural theories but today those concepts are rarely used during the design process of a house in an urban context.