Life Cycle Thinking: Strategies for Sustainable Renovation of Existing Buildings

The project focuses on developing strategies for interventions of sustainable renovation, with the awareness that re-using existing buildings allows to reduce the impact on the environment and also to maintain our cultural sources and ecosystems. The largest part of the European building stock is composed of buildings older than 30 years that will continue to account for the major portion of it also for the decades to come. These buildings are very important because of their economic, social-cultural and environmental value. Often built stock needs interventions of renovation in order to meet the actual standard of performance, both from energetic and functional point of view. Recent changes in human life style oblige to modify spaces in a quick way and this necessity has reduced the life of our buildings. For this reason it is fundamental operate on existing buildings reducing the waste production, by using the strategies of the design for de-construction and the reversible design. To do this, LCA is the best method, because it allows measuring objectively the buildings impact and the environmental benefits of renovations and also it can help in defining the most appropriate materials. This work presents the analysis of the restoration projects of two industrial buildings in a sustainability perspective. Industrial buildings were chosen as case studies because of their big sizes, good accessibility, flexible internal partitions and large pertinence areas, features which make them good candidate for rehabilitation. The focus point is how to convert this existing estate in a sustainable way, in order to reduce the need for new constructions and optimize the intrinsic qualities of forsaken industrial spaces.