1.1 Energy retrofit oh historic buildings: an overview
1.2 European and Italian Guidelines
The two Guidelines are certainly different, although they have the same purpose. The European document is synthetic and aims to guide the lecturer in the proposed procedure; the Italian one is very long with the same features of a volume.
In the first, despite its brevity, important concepts are highlighted. Among them, a few main concepts are: it is important to pay attention not only to exceptional buildings, but also to ancient city centers, focusing on authenticity – integrity – significance of the whole. It is also specified that “Maintenance is the best conservation measure” and in this field “non-standard measures could be considered”.
In contrast, the second is a collection of restoration theory concepts (as the important distinction between improvement and adaptation, borrowed from the Italian Guidelines for seismic vulnerability assessment of historical buildings) and technical parts as a support for people performing energy analysis. The text is divided as follows: knowledge of contexts (including environmental quality assessment for historic buildings); energy efficiency assessment (in this part the retrofit procedure flowchart is exposed); energy efficiency improvement (which includes: interventions on buildings and plants, economic analysis and maintenance. Attached there are also a collection of sheets on available materials and a group of case studies.). This section is followed by illustrative papers (all dedicated to photovoltaic insertion), bibliography, glossary and an example of data sheet for the building survey.
The guide also refers to non-standard solutions (e.g. fixing a second window or a window in contact with the first), underlining, that choices should be made taking precaution of the conservative values. Other solutions linked to the environment are quoted, as the use of trees for shading and water for the evapo-transpiration in dry climate for comfort purposes. The goal is to ‘wisely’ consider a range of possible interventions, focusing on innovative materials; then, explaining pros and cons of a set of retrofit techniques (e.g. interior insulation has a behavior totally different from an external one etc.). However, we will see that one of the main shortcomings is an imperfect integration between theoretical and technical parts.