Lourdes Beneito defended her doctoral thesis last September, supervised by Ana Sánchez-Ostiz Gutiérrez and Joaquín Torres Ramos. After four years studying for her doctorate at the School of Architecture, "a sacrificial but enriching process", she has taken on a new work challenge in a technical consultancy service in Madrid. There he continues with his research and studies how to apply it to rehabilitation and heritage intervention projects.

What line of research have you followed?
In order to convert dwellings into nearly zero-energy buildings, it is necessary to consider passive, active measures and renewable energy generation systems. To evaluate the different scenarios proposed, there are three core topic pillars: operational energy, which is the energy due to users' consumption; embedded energy throughout the life cycle, i.e. the end-of-life phase of the building and its circularity potential are considered. Finally, the economic cost over the entire life cycle is taken into account.

How was the research process?
After conducting a typological analysis of the housing built between 1980-2006, I consulted a representative sample of projects built in the city of Pamplona. "This allowed me to create a building typology model . I studied its current state, and proposed different rehabilitation scenarios and studied its life cycle and cost cycle.

What is the future of the term sustainable in the construction area ?
In the latest European directives, much emphasis is being placed on circular Economics . In construction we must be able to design to facilitate the dismantling of systems and make them reusable, extending their life cycle.

The industrialized systems have several advantages, and one of them is precisely to be able to design them for easy assembly and disassembly; so surely in a few years in Spain the employment these systems will grow exponentially, both in new plant projects and in rehabilitation projects.

► Lourdes Beneito with her thesis advisors