ADAPTIVE REUSE AND REHABILITATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE. A PERFORMANCE-BASED APPROACH FOR FIRE SAFETY

Abstract

The international debate on sustainable development and the growing need to find new directions for the closure of loops includes architectural issues. The countless abandoned building resources as well as buildings in advanced state of decay highlight the urgent need to extend the life cycle of the building heritage, helping the trade-off between users’ needs and past performance. The use of tools and methodologies for the simulation of different intervention scenarios allows reducing the resources needed to design and perform adaptations of existing buildings to new needs. The paper introduces an example of Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) performance-based approach applied to the rehabilitation of abandoned listed heritage buildings, of the Teatro della Concordia in Ragusa, Sicily. The findings are easy to put into practice, allowing the FSE performance approach to be used at an early stage of the design process.

Keywords: Adaptive Reuse, Performance-Based Design, Fire Safety Engineering