Passive Energy Building Concepts

This paper proposes a reflection on possible design tools for the energy-environmental refurbishment of historical massive buildings, through actions that take into consideration the historical, architectural and ecological value of the building. In line with our current national legislation and European directives, the research topic concerns operations on the built heritage as a mean towards the reduction of the environmental and economic costs, urban revitalization processes, as well as social and cultural enhancement.
An excursus on the most popular massive archetypes localized in the Mediterranean basin, means to illustrates their common performance characteristics and their bioclimatic behavior. The recognition of the loss of traditional building methods highlights the need to recover a synergic approach in the push for intervention on massive heritage. The objective of this paper aims to outline an intervention methodology to define strategic scenarios for massive historical buildings that meet the three general approaches of: recovery, refurbishment and energy retrofit. This methodology is applied to the case study of the adaptive reuse of Fort Portuense, in Rome: specifically, the experimentation wants to improve indoor comfort, with operation on the envelope stratification and on energy management of the building, trying to integrate multiple devices that cooperate synergistically with the whole system as to provide a high-energy performance building.

Buildings are responsible for around 40% of world energy use and residential buildings as an important sector consumes a significant part of this energy. The main part of the energy used in residential buildings is consumed for space heating, cooling and lighting. Solar energy as an important constituent of climate could be utilized passively for heating and cooling living spaces and providing daylight. Designing residential blocks could affect the amount of solar radiation received by inside and outside the buildings. It is assumed that orientation, residential block form and landscaping are the main design factors which determine the optimum use of solar energy and hence the need for space heating or cooling of buildings by conventional energy sources. This paper aims to study the impacts of orientation, form and landscaping on solar access in order to find the optimal residential block configuration that benefits solar conditions and provides as much solar irradiation in colder seasons and shade in warmer seasons. In this regard, the current literature and evidence are reviewed. The results of these studies indicate that proper passive solar design should consider orientation, form and landscaping as key buildings' parameters in order to provide enough solar access in different seasons.