Increasing Sustainability in Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of School Buildings

Environmental sustainability and cultural value preservation often appear as conflicting goals whenever regarding historical buildings; in consequence, most italian cultural heritage institutions seem to deny any possible innovation in this field. This paper presents an applicative work that is a first step of a research aimed at producing methods, procedures and tools, for the sustainable rehabilitation of historic buildings. It deals with the rehabilitation design of a school and it shows the case study, the methodology and the main project elements. The result of this work is an empirical design method, aimed at preserving building identity and improving condition of use and environmental sustainability. It is based on the search, the analysis and the comparison of different work alternatives and on the possibility of balancing variuos levels of presevation and/or transformation in relation to different priorities for the various buildin elements.