Tools and procedures for a “maintenance oriented” design for buildings of worship

The paper describes the results, achieved in the first year, of a three years research dealing with the themes connected with the methods and the tools for planned maintenance and concerning the proposal of a system of supports for a design “maintenance oriented”. The starting hypothesis is that most of maintenance problems emerging during the life time of a building are due to a lack of attention towards the use phase that both clients and designers demonstrate. Starting from this point of view the aim of the research was to develop and to check a system of supports, useful both for clients and for designs of buildings of worship, consisting in guide lines, procedures and evaluation tools, graduate according to the different steps of design process and carried out in order to assume and to verify the requirement of maintainability

Enhancement and knowledge

Many issues related to enhancement strategies emerge nowadays both from the scenario offered by public real estates and from the current processes of conveyance of public assets to local authorities. On one hand it is still difficult, from a strategic point of view, to approach in the medium-long term the chronic problems of the public estates due to deterioration, obsolescence and organizational inadequacy. On the other hand there is the risk that inadequate levels of knowledge lead on one side to a prevalence of the binomial enhancement-alienation and on the other side to a lack of full comprehension of the actual potentialities of the existing assets. In this direction it is possible to analyze the topic of enhancement through, among many, the key of knowledge during the lifecycle of a building

Energy performance of an exhibition hall in a life cycle perspective: embodied energy, operational energy and retrofit strategies

Nowadays, the focus on the building energy consumption in the use phase prevails over an interest concerning the energy impacts linked to all the other phases of the construction process. However, reducing operational energy could lead to shifting the impacts from one stage to another. Thus, combining the study of strategies improving energy efficiency in the use phase with a life cycle approach is crucial. Exhibition halls are peculiar buildings from the geometry, construction and use points of view, rarely addressed in energy and life cycle energy analysis studies. Therefore, in this paper, a representative hall of the Milan Trade Fair is taken as a case study. A building energy simulation model is firstly calibrated in order to derive the operational energy for climatisation. The operational energy appears artificially low due to the short use period during the year. When compared with the calculated embodied energy of the envelope and structure, it is found that 57 years would be needed to balance energy spent in the construction and in the use phase. Further, some retrofit interventions are proposed and analyzed. Insulation interventions are not attractive from the economic payback time point of view. However, when the embodied energy of the retrofit interventions is compared with the energy savings in the use phase, interesting energy payback times are obtained. Therefore, this study puts in evidence on the importance of adopting a life cycle perspective, especially for buildings with low-intensity use. Eventually, the critical issues of the life cycle energy analysis are deeply discussed

The integration of physical and digital urban infrastructures: the role of “Big data”

Le molte evoluzioni nell’ambito della gestione delle informazioni, l’affermarsi dei concetti di Big Data e IoT (internet of things), lo sviluppo e la diffusione della sensoristica stanno aprendo a innovativi scenari e delineando nuove questioni rispetto alle attività conoscitive e decisionali, con declinazioni specifiche se considerate in relazione all’ambito applicativo delle infrastrutture e dei beni edilizi e urbani. A partire da queste premesse, obiettivo del paper è delineare l’attuale quadro dei fattori tecnologici di innovazione e proporre alcune ipotesi circa i potenziali scenari futuri dei servizi di supporto alla gestione e allo sviluppo del territorio e dei manufatti edilizi a partire da diverse possibili forme di integrazione tra infrastrutture urbane fisiche e digitali. Nell’ambito delle infrastrutture, l’analisi del ruolo dell’informazione rispetto all’interazione tra materiale e immateriale pone una serie di questioni interpretative che il paper tratteggia.

Integrated management of information inside maintenance processes. From the building registry to BIM systems

The paper presents objec- tives, methods and results of two researches dealing with the improvement of integrated information management within maintenance processes. Focusing on information needs regarding the last phases of the building process, the two researches draft approaches characterizing a path of progressive improve- ment of strategies for integration: from a building registry, unique for the whole construction process, to an integrated management of the building process with the support of BIM systems