Strategies for the Sustainable Renovation of Existing Residential Buildings: a Case Study of an Industrialized Public Building in the Florence Area

The European Directive 2010/31/UE requires to intervene on the existing buildings, hugely polluting and with a low energy efficiency. Indeed the building sector accounts for about the 40% of total energy consumption in the Union. In Italy 70% of existing buildings presents a low record of energy efficiency, hence a high rate of saving can be achieved especially through the redevelopment of the building envelope and installations. Our work is focused on some possible strategies to be applied on a particular class of existing residential buildings. The class chosen for the study is representative of our environmental context and emblematic in the application of industrialized and prefabricated building techniques in Tuscany, especially in the Florence area. The object of this work is a public residential building located in Prato built with industrialized techniques during the '80s. This building is representative of a large number of interventions made by IACP Institute for residential public buildings in Florence from 1979 to 1987. This paper shows the results in terms of energy saving and internal comfort after the application of strategies meant to fit the climate and the main building features. More in detail the strategies will be focused both on the reduction of the energy demand for heating and the overheating during summer. Taking the latter into account we tried to consider the real behavior of the occupants in windows opening and how this can influence the internal comfort.