Strategic scenarios in energy-environmental refurbishment of the massive building stock

This report aims to illustrate the impact of energy-environmental upgrading strategies, when applied synergistically on building organisms. In particular it focuses on analysing the ‘massive’ typology, which has assumed a vital role in our building tradition as a high performance response to the Mediterranean’s specific climatic conditions. The energy and environmental refurbishment of a military Roman fort becomes object of further study through thermodynamic and fluid-dynamic simulations to display simultaneously different intervention scenarios. After an analysis of Mediterranean records/case studies offering a sampling of ‘massive’ architectures that stand out for the high thermal inertia, containment of energy losses, thermal performances of the building envelope are investigated through theoretical analysis on the relationship established within the main strategies of refurbishment: massive envelope comes up like an extremely dynamic component of the building organism, whose adaptive behaviour reacts to both external and internal heat sources and contributes to microclimatic comfort provided that all the other parts of the building cooperating. Thanks to the collection of local climatic data and their application in a first dynamic simulation of solar radiation on exposed surfaces and natural ventilation-verifying the relationship between built and environmental systems- numerical results for different strategic scenarios, made possible to highlight mode and extent of the benefits on the building organism triggered by the passive interventions’ synergies, confirming the asserted argument.