Recreation of cultural historical values in buildings from before 1945: Inventory with focus on building physics performance

Paper in proceeding, 2017

The housing stock in Sweden is getting more attention for national energy saving measures. This study is part of a larger multi-disciplinary research project in which building physicists, architects and building antiquarians work together to develop a holistic retrofitting approach. The first part of the project concerns inventories of building components in buildings from before 1945 in need of a second major renovation. The focus of the inventories is on energy performance, moisture resistance, long-term durability and thermal comfort. The inventories are used to investigate alternative and improved solutions for re-renovation to recreate e.g. architectural details and cultural historical values in balance with contemporary demands for function and aesthetics. In this study, different databases with information on energy use, year of construction, value year and geographical data were combined. It became evident that there is a large variation in quality of data and that different data sources have different information. For instance, among the investigated buildings, many were reported as being built in 1929. This was in most cases (71%) incorrect. We found that the year of renovation is often missing and the calculation of value year is not consistent or is lacking. Comparing the energy use for buildings with different year of construction may give the impression that older buildings have better energy performance. This is not correct. When looking into the value year, it becomes evident that the older buildings have been more renovated and there is no such correlation. The inventories also showed that it is usually the exterior wall facing the courtyard, or southern facing façades, which has additional insulation, and that great care has to be taken when changing façades and windows to balance cultural historical values.