Building Upward: Methodological Approach to Defining Criteria and Guidelines for Interventions for Italian Post-War Housing Refurbishment in a Seismic Area

Refurbishment of existing buildings, in order to reduce environmental impact, both in terms of land take and CO₂ emissions, must be one of the priorities of the whole building sector. Quantitatively, residential housing built in 1950–1990 accounts for the highest energy consumption, since its low-quality technology has caused its swift material and performance-related decay (not to mention social and urban), as reported in 2011 by the Building Performance Institute Europe (BPIE). In Italy, the earthquakes in Umbria and Marche (1997), Abruzzo (2009), Emilia (2012), and Lazio (2016) made it imperative to resort to seismic risk prevention, before the energy-consumption analysis. The paper presents the first results of the research concerning methodologies and qualitative analyses, whose objects have been twofold: (1) identifying the criteria and guidelines of intervention when adding floors, paying particular attention to construction-related and structural aspects within the seismic analysis; and (2) testing such criteria through one case study, namely a 1970s Azienda Territoriale Edilizia Residenziale (ATER) social housing building in Rovigo. The analysis of the building and its modeling through ad hoc software (Revit and Midas) has determined a first evaluation of its feasibility in a digital environment, analyzing the building’s structural behavior under seismic action before and after the intervention—besides while work was in progress—underlining the potentialities and drawbacks that adding floors implies.