Background: Less is more - or is it? On sufficiency in building
The question "How much is enough?" has become a hotly discussed topic in architecture of late - at least in parts of Central Europe. In ecological theory, sufficiency - i.e. moderate consumption - is regarded as the third component of effective sustainability strategies. The first two of these are efficiency (which aims to achieve more with less resources) and consistency (which strives towards closed cycles of materials and the use of renewable energy). In practice, the 'insufficiencies' in the way we erect and use buildings and city districts are strikingly obvious. For example, the heating demand of Germany's residential building stock has steadily decreased by around 1.8% per year since 2005 (Fig. 4). Most of these efficiency gains, however, have simply been consumed by the continual increase in the amount of living space per capita. Moreover, targets have been achieved only with respect to heating energy; the consumption of electrical energy in households is still increasing steadily - in Switzerland alone, by 15 % in the last decade.
