The abandonment and deterioration of historic rural buildings in Europe raise significant issues, including hydrogeological risks, the loss of productive land, and cultural heritage decline. Despite being underestimated, these structures hold significant potential for cultural and productive activities. Renovating these structures is crucial for local communities committed to preserving their heritage, and it is a more sustainable approach than constructing new buildings. This study explores activities undertaken in the Interreg IT/AT project “SHELTER” in Valbrenta (IT): through a participatory approach involving communities, stakeholders, designers, and researchers, an energy concept is developed for refurbishing an abandoned tobacco farm, chosen by the community, to be an alpine hut. Due to the inability to connect to the city electricity grid, the new energy concept focuses on minimizing consumption through envelope refurbishment, efficient heating, and domestic hot water systems. Additionally, the integration of renewable energy sources, particularly Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), is emphasized to preserve the building’s original appearance. This study demonstrates the feasibility of meeting seasonal energy needs entirely through renewables and explores the potential integration of biomass for meeting annual energy requirements.

The challenge of transforming historic buildings and city centers into energy-self-sufficient environments requires innovative solutions. The research project “BiPV meets History” addressed this challenge by providing comprehensive guidelines for assessing the integration of photovoltaic (PV) systems in protected historic architectural contexts. To validate these guidelines, this study conducts a thorough examination of best practices through the mentioned guidelines, developing an application tool. Recognizing the power of well-communicated best practices in overcoming obstacles to integrated photovoltaic adoption, this tool is used to assess PV integration quality with respect to the best practice contained in the HiBERatlas database. The analysis of 17 successful refurbishment cases highlighted the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology, considering aesthetic, technical, and energy aspects. This study emphasizes the potential of the guidelines for achieving a harmonious integration of renewable energy solutions with historic architectural heritage and landscape and improving usability through the developed tool.

This study presents an in-depth analysis of 69 case studies focusing on the energy retrofit of historic buildings, uncovering challenges, best practices, and lessons learned to balance energy efficiency improvements with heritage preservation. The findings highlight several challenges encountered during renovations, such as complex heritage evaluations, restrictions on alterations, coordination issues with authorities, technical limitations, higher investment costs, and knowledge gaps. On the other hand, identifying factors promoting renovation, including demonstrating energy savings while respecting heritage, early collaboration between planners and authorities, and quantifying investments, could incentivize owners and authorities. The limitations of a still-limited sample size, occasional incomplete data, and potential sample bias call for cautious interpretation of the presented analysis. Despite these, the study provides valuable insights into successful projects, emphasizing the need for scalability, knowledge transfer from innovative policies, and targeted policy-making for successful replication. The study concludes with a call for further development of the HiBERatlas (Historic Building Energy Retrofit atlas), an extensive resource for historic building renovation, expanding its database, collaborating with agencies, and tailoring guidance for stakeholders to foster energy retrofits in heritage buildings.

This study explores the influence of uncertain boundary climate conditions on the hygrothermal performance of an internally insulated historic masonry wall using numerical simulations. The research compares diverse internal and external climate data sources to evaluate their reliability. A pre-validated hygrothermal simulation model serves as the benchmark for comparing simulated data with actual monitoring data. An array of climate data sources, including adaptive indoor climate models defined in the EN 15026 and UNI EN ISO 13788 standards, Typical Meteorological Years, and ground weather station data are considered. The core assessment parameters are temperature and relative humidity values beneath the insulation. Unexpectedly, the findings reveal that external climate conditions have a minor influence on the simulation results. Conversely, internal climate conditions significantly impact the outcomes, causing substantial variations. These implications underline the criticality of selecting an appropriate indoor climate model and moisture load class. The incorrect choice can lead to substantial errors, with peak relative humidity values predicted by the models varying in a range greater than 15 percentage points of relative humidity. In conclusion, the study reveals that utilizing Typical Meteorological Years and adaptive indoor climate models still yields excellent results, despite the inherent uncertainties. Moreover, this study emphasizes the importance of carefully selecting suitable indoor climate models to enhance the accuracy of hygrothermal simulations in historic buildings and underlines the need for future research focused on developing more precise guidelines for identifying the correct moisture load classes.

Interior insulation plays a key role in reducing the energy consumption of historic buildings. However, it might cause moisture accumulation
and must be thoroughly analyzed. The use of recycled materials allows for further reduction of environmental impact. This paper presents
the study of a new insulating plaster containing aerogel and recycled glass used as capillary active interior insulation system. Firstly, the
hygrothermal properties of the material are measured in laboratory to obtain a complete characterization. Laboratory tests results are post-
processed to obtain the data required as input by the simulation software. Finally, hygrothermal simulations are carried out to investigate
the material’s behavior in realistic application scenarios and to study how different input parameters affect the results.

Humidity, salt content, and migration in building materials lead to weathering and are a common challenge. To understand damage phenomena and select the right conservation treatments, knowledge on both the amount and distribution of moisture and salt load in the masonry is crucial. It was shown that commercial portable devices addressing moisture are often limited by the mutual interference of these values. This can be improved by exploiting broadband radar reflectometry for the quantification of humidity in historic masonry. Due to the above-mentioned limitations, today’s gold standard for evaluating the moisture content in historic buildings is still conducted by taking drilling samples with a subsequent evaluation in a specially designed laboratory, the so-called Darr method. In this paper, a new broadband frequency approach in the range between 0.4 and 6 GHz with improved artificial-intelligence data analysis makes sure to optimize the reflected signal, simplify the evaluation of the generated data, and minimise the effects of variables such as salt contamination that influence the permittivity. In this way, the amount of water could be determined independently from the salt content in the material and an estimate of the salt load. With new machine learning algorithms, the analysis of the permittivity is improved and can be made accessible for everyday use on building sites with minimal intervention by the user. These algorithms were trained with generated data from different drying studies on single building bricks from the masonries. The findings from the laboratory studies were then validated and evaluated on real historic buildings at real construction sites. Thus, the paper shows a spatially resolved and salt-independent measurement system for determining building moisture.

Kulturelle Bildung – ein Containerbegriff, welcher mit verschiedensten Merkmalen assoziiert ist. Wie verstehen lokale Akteur*innen Kulturelle Bildung, und wie kann dies zur Begriffsschärfung bezüglich der Strukturen, Angebote, Dimensionen und Wirkung Kultureller Bildung beitragen?
Für eine erste Annäherung an diese Frage wurden 34 Akteur*innen aus verschiedenen Sektoren Kultureller Bildung aus der Region und Stadt Coburg in leitfadengestützten Expert*inneninterviews befragt und die Interviews mittels qualitativer Inhaltsanalyse ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse geben einen Überblick über die Perspektive lokaler Akteur*innen auf die aktuelle Lage Kultureller Bildung in der Stadt und Region Coburg (Oberfranken), auf Wirkpotenziale sowie Vernetzungs- und Förderbedarfe. Der besondere Zeitpunkt der Erhebung (August – Dezember 2020) ermöglicht darüber hinaus Einblicke in die Kulturelle Bildung während der COVID-19 Pandemie, beschreibt diesbezügliche Veränderungen und hinterfragt diese kritisch.  Darüber hinaus setzt die differenziert kategorisierende Analyse von Begriffsverständnissen, Strukturen und Dimensionen aus der Perspektive lokaler Akteur*innen Impulse für zukünftige, auch konturiert quantifizierende Forschung im Feld der Kulturellen Bildung.