An Integrated Approach for Energy and Environmental Improvement of Built Heritage Through Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Built heritage conservation and environmental design are undergoing a cross-fertilisation process that is strongly interdisciplinary, holistic and capable of leveraging the best of both hard sciences and humanities. The recent actions of the Climate Heritage Network, with the development of the European Cultural Heritage Green Paper in response to the European Green Deal, frame built heritage as a key resource and driver for the fight against climate change. The greatest challenge in built heritage energy and environmental improvement is to propose design solutions that are both compatible with the international restoration charters and verified from a performance-based design point of view. Some interesting studies in the field are addressing the whole energy and environmental improvement process of built heritage with highly specific workflows capable to deal with the heterogeneity and complexities of historical buildings. Among the most promising tools to support these workflows are Heritage Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Performance Simulation (BPS). The first is to be intended as a support for the whole-process management and as a mean to enhance transparency and reduce uncertainties, while the second as a way to address the technical challenges of identifying the complex energy and environmental behaviour of the current state of the building. Among these researches, BEEP Project "BIM for Energy Efficiency in the Public sector", funded under the ENI CBC Med Programme, is focusing on an advanced but still pragmatic methodology to foster built heritage sensitive retrofitting within a joint multidisciplinary framework using both BIM and BPS. The workflow was applied to 9 case studies in Italy, Spain, Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and Jordan and the project developed a whole process guideline suited to deal with different contexts further improving its scalability.