Retrofitting Hospitals: A Parametric Design Approach to Optimize Energy Efficiency

Despite many progress have been done in the renovation of the existing stock, retrofitting hospitals and other strategic buildings still represent a very challenging issue both for their complex articulation and for the need to maintain acceptable operational level. The paper reports a research activity, run at the Department of Architecture in cooperation with S. Orsola Hospital in Bologna, aimed at investigating innovative strategies for retrofitting to meet the highest energy efficiency standards at national level. The main goal of the administration was to set a renovation plan-taking into account some limitations concerning the existing building features and the budget availabilities- A ble to remarkably reduce energy demand while creating the minimum disruption for end users. The starting position of the research was to preserve the historical image of the building while defining a strategy to insulate it from inside. The novelty of design approach lied in defining a basic working unit which was associated to the typical room of the stay division that was used to analyse the starting conditions (indoor comfort and environmental parameters) and simulate via software modelling the potential improvements. This led to define a step by step strategy that was translated into global intervention scenarios while the basic working unit was properly re-designed and validated. This approach allowed to define a parametric strategy able to predict the impacts of renovation on each floor, on each wing and on the system as a whole while assigning a specific unit cost and a reliable renovation timing.