Office Buildings Cooling Need in the Italian Climatic Context: Assessing the Performances of Typical Envelopes

This study assesses the cooling thermal energy need of office buildings that can represent typical cases within the Italian context, in particular defined by the envelope solutions that belong to three main construction ages, including new solutions that meet the current requirements for the envelope thermal properties. The results show that the large-glazed and lighter solutions (also newly built, consistent with the recent standards) reveal the worst behavior, while the buildings characterized by the lowest needs are the old conventional ones, even though they do not comply with the recent requirements for the envelope components. The same cooling performances are achieved by newly built insulated envelopes if they are “conventionally-glazed”, but only when a strategy to loose the heat stored by the massive internal surfaces is adopted.