“Sustainable Campus”: a starting point for a Building Sustainable Refurbishment. Energy-Efficiency Upgrading and Thermal Comfort

The European construction sector is characterized by a great amount of low performances building assets, researchers proved that simply improving the insulation of existing buildings with interventions of refurbishment does not give assurance on actual improvement of buildings sustainability. The aim of the research is to give the interested stakeholder a method that can be used as a certification procedure of buildings condition and in order to choose among different project alternatives to get the most sustainable solution in terms of economy, environment and society. This method investigates mainly two aspects of existing buildings: the building residual performance and the refurbishment potential in terms of sustainability gains. Consequently, the output of this method consists of two indexes: one related to the actual performance and the other to the refurbishment prospective. The first one is assessed considering all the aspects of the existent building, for instance: components service life, degradation, availability of mandatory documents, operational consumptions, etc.. On the other hand, the second index starts from the discovered criticalities and rises with project alternatives able to solve them. These two indexes are developed, starting from existing protocols and software, to obtain a system able to assess the sustainability performance since the early design stage. The connection between the two indexes allows assessing the real estate, characterizing each building with a performance level and evaluating the feasible sustainability improvements