The rehabilitation of buildings. Reflections on construction systems for the environmental sustainability of interventions

Abstract

The old age and the poor state of repair of the Italian building heritage and the change in the needs and lifestyle of modern society require re-qualitative interventions of building rehabilitation. These operations are environmentally sustainable, favouring the protection of the soil, allowing the grey energy of the materials that make up the building to be depreciated over a greater number of years and which will have sufficient residual performance, also thanks to integration with other components. In order to safeguard the intrinsic sustainability of the rehabilitation of the building, it is necessary to act in the intervention taking into account its sustainability, considering the life cycle of both the building as a whole together with its specific redevelopment project. Sustainability in the management phase is conditioned by energy efficiency; in the construction and demolition phases, however, it is conditioned both by the construction techniques and the connection methods between the different elements of the construction system, and above all by the choice of its components and materials that make it up. The paper presents as an international best practice a dry construction system made with recycled elements derived from scaffolding and a wet construction system consisting of components in lime and hemp.

Keywords

• sustainable rehabilitation
• sustainable construction systems
• natural materials
• lime and hemp
• scaffolding