Energy incidence of historic building: Leaving no stone unturned

Energy and sustainability are a hard challenge in building heritage, both the technical solutions in order to solve impact of energy conservation and aspect of conservation and maintenance of architectural heritage, and also the bigger target: sustainable development of human activity. The first issue is quantitative and measurable. The second issue is qualitative: what does sustainability of historic building mean? In some way historic building are the building that was preserved by past generation, which spend more economic and social resources, in order to maintain the ability of future generations to meet it. The energy saving in historic building is a " new challenger" of research, but this may not able be a priority in order to sustainable development aims, if they are not to be subject to preservation of historic building. © 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS.