Technological performances upgrading and rehabilitation of building heritage inside the historic centre of Palermo

Abstract

The recovery of building heritage through the containment of carbon emissions is one of the strategies pursued by the city of Palermo. This design approach becomes more paradigmatic when it’s referred to sensitive and historic buildings or urban areas, having an international interest or involved in participatory projects for the Mediterranean city, well beyond the attention that citizens attest to them. We would analyse the Volta electrical Power Station, inside the harbour area and near the Castello a mare, interested by the overall rehabilitation of Palermo waterfront. This building qualifies itself, through a retrofit hypothesis proposed by the authors of this essay, as a significant example of rehabilitation design, capable to respect memory but also to propose an improvement of energy performance, through a compatible and technological implementation that use information technology in order to verify passive strategies for internal environmental comfort, an improvement of healthiness and quality of confined environments through high-tech plant engineering choices. The results of this study is a design proposal of a system of openings and evaporative cooling, contributing to lower the internal temperature during summer.