Energy Improvement for Cultural Heritage

The historic buildings conservation alone is a necessary but not sufficient condition to a restoration project; if there is no re-use, the real goal lacks: to take account of the actors, the people who use a building. The re-use proposes itself as a possible strategy to allow the effective opportunity to enjoy the Cultural Heritage and, at the same time, to give an appropriate response to constantly changing needs and regulations, in order to the socioeconomic situation, too. In this regard, today, we talk about exploitation of the existing heritage. The modernization and refunctionalization project becomes a helping tool both solving the critical issues of an obsolete construction, that has never been able to answer performance regulations (energy saving, fire safety, accessibility), and monitoring and improving the management of the building, but, at the same time, re-use should consider the comparison with the existing heritage by a task of research (historic identity, constraints, construction characteristics). Each building is an unicum and it's necessary to act on a case-by-case basis, preserving the peculiarity of a construction. The paper illustrates a research, developed on behalf of ENEA (italian national agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable development), which tries to define guidelines for improving energy performances of ancient buildings and for an efficient management of building systems, in preparation of an action plan's drafting. The case of study is the Villa Reale in Monza, which becomes an ideal experimentation’s context, because of its importance and its complexity.