Innovative technologies, certification and assessment tools for a sustainable building heritage

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).