The living building: integrating the built environment with nature evaluating the Bibliotheca of Alexandria according to the challenge imperatives

Over the last 20 years, ‘green buildings’ have grown to become one of the most significant and progressive trends in the building industry. Sustainability is an extremely important direction, which has been given great attention and progress in recent years, especially in engineering and architecture. The paper motivates green building designers to ultimately transform their projects and innovate new techniques while demonstrating that built and natural ecosystems can integrate with each other using current technology. The research illustrates the sustainable design elements according to ‘The Living Building Challenge’. In this context, a building should be ‘Living’ when it achieves some imperatives: it has to generate its own energy on site using renewable sources, capture and treat its own water, be constructed of non-toxic and sustainable sourced materials, use only previously developed sites and be beautiful and inspiring to its inhabitants. Looking at these multiple processes encouraged moving beyond the concept of responsive architecture so that a ‘Living’ building can interact and adapt to external stimuli, it has to also inspire and educate the people who deal with it. The Bibliotheca of Alexandria is reviewed as a case study according to Living building qualifications in its existing condition and also investigate the possible scores and their feasibility in the case of a redevelopment of the project.