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The building sector, which is responsible for a significant amount of total global energy consumption, provides substantial opportunities for energy efficiency studies. In the context of historic and traditional buildings, this matter becomes more crucial, as energy efficiency is more complex and challenging. The complexity partly derives from the multiple and diverse values with which the buildings are associated. These values are dynamic. In this paper, we chose historic houses in Gaziantep as our focal point. They provide an indicative example of houses with architectural features that help residents deal with the adverse effects of the hot climate. These specific features are significant for the users not only in terms of thermal comfort but also in terms of heritage values. The value that users attribute to the neighbourhood and their attitude towards buildings change over time. It is seen that thermal comfort plays a key role in energy efficiency and heritage conservation. Hence, understanding the role of thermal comfort perceptions and the ways in which they dictate certain energy efficiency and heritage conservation actions is critical. In this context, this paper addresses these dynamic, complex, and changing interrelationships over time. Drawing upon the dynamic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with three dwellings in Gaziantep's Bey neighbourhood, we will discuss how residents of historic houses perceive thermal comfort and how they negotiate and prioritise energy efficiency and heritage conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of inter-connecting artefacts within the broad category of 'energy' across multiple heritage collections raises very significant challenges. Energy per se is itself invisible, manifested only in a bewildering diversity of technological mediations of its acquisition, storage or transformation from one form to another (e.g. chemical to thermal, or electrical to motive). And while energy usage via such technology is easily linked to industrial growth and global prosperity, it is also entangled in multiple stories of human and environmental destruction over many centuries, albeit unevenly distributed over social class and global location. How then can the Congruence Engine project draw some coherent stories together from heritage collections that hold energy-related artefacts of so many kinds? Our paper explores how the Congruence Engine's Energy team will approach this task by taking as our starting point two specific collections of Newcastle's Discovery Museum: steam turbines and coal mining. Focusing on that particularly convenient pair of preliminary case studies enables us to look ahead to how we can bring the Congruence Engine project's digital humanities tools more fully to bear in linking such energetic heritage to other (at least part) digitised collections of films, photographs, songs and journals, etc. In so doing, we highlight the need to address the broader cultural landscape of energy, often involving emotional human stories, that bring meaning to museum audiences' engagement with energy's material culture. And in contrast to traditional museum narratives of energy history as the technocratic 'conquering' of nature, we consider how the Congruence Engine project could help to bring in a complementary approach: memorialising energy history instead as a human drama entangled with many forms of human loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's clear that good results in the field of environmental sustainability can be obtained by energy efficiency policies for buildings - mostly undertaken or in itinere - built for more than 50% before the disregarded law 373/76 that provided, in the period of the European oil crisis, constraints for design, installation, operation and maintenance of heating systems and requirements for thermal insulation of buildings to contain consumption. On the other hand, it is less clear the part of buildings subject to conservation (in accordance with the Legislative Decree 42/2004 or former regulations on the subject) or listed buildings ope legis (art. 12 of italian legislative Decree 42/2004, asset belonging to the State, regions, public territorial authorities, as well as any other public body and institute and private non-profit legal entities and which are the work of an author who is no longer alive and whose execution dates back to more than seventy years) for which it would not be possible to apply the limitations of the decrees 192/2005 and 311/2006, which relieve the buildings "in which compliance with the requirements would entail an unacceptable alteration of their nature or appearance, with particular reference to historical or artistic features" of the energy efficiency obligations. In this paper we want to justify and illustrate some choices made by international research institutes regarding the difficulty in reconciling the new requests of sustainability related to the need to reduce consumption (especially from fossil fuels) with those of the historical value of the buildings subject to intervention, presenting evaluation criteria that can provide an objective method for quantifying the compatibility between new and existing, criteria that - in order to have predictive capacity and therefore be able to guide choices ex ante and not measure them ex post - use digital design tools (BIM, GIS, etc). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current legislative framework and the recent energy crisis ask for massive applications of renewable energy sources (RES) in the built environment to reduce energy demand, environmental emissions, and energy costs. The uncritical application of these policies, especially on architectural heritage, could generate serious conservation issues, compromising their heritage values, biodiversity, traditional appearance, and materiality. Thus, there is an urgent call to balance architectural heritage preservation with energy production using clear rules, policies, criteria, and heritage-compatible technologies. The present study aims at defining an updated overview of the application of solar, wind, geothermal energy, and bioenergy on architectural heritage. A deep literature review of the studies published in the years 2020–2023 has been performed, identifying main topics, challenges, advanced solutions, and future perspectives. Acceptability, design criteria, and cutting-edge technologies are also illustrated through case studies to better understand practical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is pursuing an ambitious policy on climate action, urgently calling for an acceleration in the transition toward net-zero emissions by 2050. In this context, retrofitting historic constructions can play a key role in reducing European energy consumption and consequent emissions. What is more, beyond the opportunity for tackling climate change, thermal retrofits can improve indoor comfort while lowering operational costs, factors that are fundamental to ensure the continued use of historic constructions over time, and with that, improving their preservation and durability. The suitability of thermal insulation for this scope is still a debated topic. Thus, this study aims at contributing to the discussion by providing an overview on the feasibility of adopting thermal insulation for retrofitting external walls of historic buildings while preserving their significance and unique identities. Finally, the advantages of adopting thermal mortars rather than more traditional insulation solutions are outlined, and their potential efficacy is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]