Search results for "Refurbishment"
showing 10 items of 17 documents
FULL PAPER: Earth for social housing in Palestine: an alternative for a sustainable refurbishment of building’s envelopes
2016
The suitable climates in the cities of Jericho and Gaza boosted the emergence of new attempts to revive earthen architecture on organizational and individual levels. These attempts produced a number of earthen buildings in the last few years following the crucial need to find alternative low cost material instead of natural stone, which is used in a large scale in Palestine. Similar attempts had a certain response to the social needs and economic situation there. This paper focuses on the possibility of using earth as an alternative material to refurbish the envelopes of existing housing units including two categories; firstly, refurbishing envelopes of housing units those were partially de…
Are the Best Available Technologies the only viable for energy interventions in historical buildings?
2014
Worth aged buildings represent among the existing buildings a special case when it comes to their energy refurbishment. Current available technologies for building components, characterized by high level of thermal performances, unfortunately, are also characterized, not rarely, by limited compatibility with the architectural integrity of the building. In other words, the so-called Best Available Technologies that are effectively adopted to optimize the energy performances of buildings, in the case of aged buildings to which a certain artistic, historic and/or architectural merit is recognized (heritage houses) could, actually, determine such kind of conflicts and therefore leading to the s…
An overview of energy retrofit actions feasibility on Italian historical buildings
2017
Abstract Italian energy policy has determined important keystones in building energy efficiency regulations and their application throughout the country. However, there is still much work to be done in order to make sustainable societies and territories, especially in historical contexts that have the greatest potentiality of energy saving. In detail, in the framework of conservation, restoration, refurbishment, and retrofit actions, the debate among scientists, administrators and skilled people is still open due to the many aspects yet to be considered and solved. In this paper, the state of the art of Italian residential building heritage has been reviewed, while energy retrofit issues an…
EARTH FOR SOCIAL HOUSING IN PALESTINE: AN ALTERNATIVE FOR A SUSTAINABLE REFURBISHMENT OF BUILDINGS’ ENVELOPES
2015
The suitable climates in the cities of Jericho and Gaza boosted the emergence of new attempts to revive earthen architecture on organizational and individual levels. These attempts produced a number of earthen buildings in the last few years following the crucial need to find alternative low cost material instead of natural stone, which is used in a large scale in Palestine. Similar attempts had a certain response to the social needs and economic situation there. This paper focuses on the possibility of using earth as an alternative material to refurbish the envelopes of existing housing units including two categories; firstly, refurbishing envelopes of housing units those were partially de…
Plaster ventilated façade system for renovating modern and ancient buildings. A CFD analysis
2021
In the past decades several researches have been related to energy saving and emissions reduction. The technologies that exploit passive natural ventilation, like ventilated roofs and fa ades, have been recognized as the effective methods to provide energy saving and comfort. Ventilated fa ades represent dry assembled coating systems for buildings, traditionally made of panels in different materials. Very few ventilated fa ade systems with plaster finishes are already present on the building market. The potentiality of their design solution can be considered, e.g., when an historic building has to be recovered, since they can enhance the energy efficiency of building without changing its ap…
Scenarios of Climatic Resilience, Economic Feasibility and Environmental Sustainability for the Refurbishment of the Early 20th Century Buildings
2019
This paper aims to examine the theme of energy retrofit within the circumscribed field of refurbishment interventions on load-bearing masonry buildings built in the early 20th century. These include a remarkable share of the fabric of many European cities and, in particular, they can be found in geographical areas characterized by a Mediterranean (mild) climate. The main objective is to increase the climate resilience of the buildings by verifying the economic feasibility and the environmental sustainability of the interventions at the same time observing the specific architectural features of the buildings. We put forward alternative retrofit solutions carrying out synoptic comparisons of …
On the impact of safety requirements, energy prices and investment costs in street lighting refurbishment design
2018
Abstract Street lighting is an indispensable feature for the night landscape of cities. It is important for road safety, users visual comfort, crime prevention and to augment the perceived personal safety. Realize and maintain an adequate street lighting service is very expensive for municipalities with significant impact on their budgets. For this reason, special attention should be paid to the design of new street lighting systems and to the refurbishment of existing ones, since many of them are inadequate. In light of this it is very important to implement street lighting designs that fulfil lighting requirements avoiding energy waste and light pollution and, at the same time, result eco…
Reviving earthen architecture in Palestine: The added significances of the building sustainability and an opportunity for the future
2016
Several attempts have emerged recently in Palestine aiming to find an economical-environmental alternative building material beside the widely-used natural stone as a main building material, due to some factors related to the cost and the negative effects of stone mining areas on the local environment. Similar attempts had a certain response to the peculiar social needs and economic situation there. The efforts led to revive earthen architecture on organizational and individual levels, producing a certain number of earthen buildings in the last few years. In order to evaluate the appropriateness of earth as an alternative raw material in Palestine, the paper outlines the general advantages …
Is the NZEB Benchmarking Approach Suitable for Assessing Energy Retrofit Design?
2013
Currently, many effort have been done to enable energy saving issues in building design and many definitions have been introduced for most performing constructions based on energy balance between energy demand and supply. Recently, the Net Zero Energy Building theory has bypassed old Passive House concept but many questions still remain open. Present work aims to estimate how NZEB requirements matching could be affected by the choice of their definition and the choice of weighting factor system, to be count in the energy balance. NZEB concept is mainly referred to new buildings design. Its application to existing buildings is for sure an hard task provided the architecture and physical cons…
Space syntax analysis applied to urban street lighting: Relations between spatial properties and lighting levels
2019
According to the international technical standards, higher lighting levels (luminance and illuminance levels) are expected in trafficked and central roads (where restrictive minimum lighting requirements are necessary) and lower lighting levels are expected in peripheral and less trafficked roads. Starting from this assumption, in this paper, the authors analyse the correlations between spatial properties (expressed by spatial indicators, for example, the integration index and the choice index) and lighting levels (expressed by lighting parameters, for example luminance and illuminance) upon roads of an urban context. The analysis has been applied to the case study of the medium sized town …