Incremental Integrated Holistic Rehabilitation: A New Concept to Boost a Deep Renovation of the Existing Building Stock

Abstract

The renovation of the post-World-War-II reinforced concrete building has become an urgent action in order to meet energy-saving and to foster safety among the European communities. In this context, in order to overcome the major barriers to the renovation and to increase the feasibility of a deep, sustainable renovation action, a new incremental holistic rehabilitation (IHR) approach is introduced. This new approach has the major aim of fostering a safe, resilient and more sustainable society by addressing the life cycle thinking principles and by implementing incremental levels of safety. In this paper, an IHR strategy is defined and applied to a reference scholastic building. Fundamental criteria for the selection of the proper renovation strategy guaranteeing the minimum environmental impact and the applicability to Reinforce Concrete existing infilled frames are derived. The results show that a holistic incremental rehabilitation strategy can represent a good answer to the urgent need of sustainable renovation of Italian and European building stock.

Design of diagrid exoskeletons for the retrofit of existing RC buildings

“…They can be assembled from outside and can be complemented with energy efficiency and architectural improvement measures. Given the high adaptability and flexibility of diagrids compared with other solutions, these structures can be easily adopted in incremental holistic rehabilitation plans when the initial costs of the retrofit are too high or the existing building functions cannot be relocated [8].…”

“…In order to overcome these barriers, diagrid exoskeletons can be implemented from the outside of the building, thereby avoiding the occupant's relocation and can implement dry technologies to speed up the construction time. In addition, when the initial costs of the renovation are too demanding, modular diagrids can be developed by adopting an incremental holistic rehabilitation (IHR) strategy [8], which allows to decompose the implementation of the common single step intervention into a series of less impacting retrofit actions to be completed over an extended period of time, often integrating them into ongoing facility maintenance interventions.…”

Seismic and Energy Integrated Retrofitting of Existing Buildings with an Innovative ICF-Based System: Design Principles and Case Studies

“…The aforementioned works highlight how the importance of holistic renovation [10,11] and sustainable building renovation (SBR) [12] principles is becoming more and more recognized in recent years, leading to retrofitting approaches that involve several, or possibly all, building deficiencies. However, the employment of these approaches in current design practice still faces several obstacles.…”

Application of a Wooden Prefabricated Shell Exoskeleton for the Integrated and Sustainable Retrofit of a Residential Building

“…To overcome the economic and operational barriers that arise for the rehabilitation of buildings in case of restricted budgets, the incremental rehabilitation approach may thus be adopted. This concept, introduced in [7] and further explored in [8], among others, involves planning a comprehensive intervention through a series of steps distributed over time and organized according to structural (minimum intervention), economic (budget limitations) and functional criteria (site sharing with planned maintenance interventions) so as to ensure the feasibility and effectiveness of the intervention. From these premises comes the idea of employing holistic renovation techniques built from the outside of the building, coupling seismic reinforcement exoskeletons with energy and plant efficiency systems and with customizable architectural finishes, designed to meet the LCT principles and to be realized according to an incremental rehabilitation perspective [9].…”