A sustainable and social-oriented urban buildings’ reshape

Existing dense urban areas are facing the problem of reducing urban sprawl and soil sealing; therefore, effective urban regeneration actions are needed. In this framework, the increasing demand for a sustainable renovation design could be addressed using a typologically oriented renovation involving urban buildings. In particular, energy renovation, which is often related to upgrading the existing facades, could bring into light the intrinsic typological structure of the building, i.e., implementing the reshaping of buildings so that they can be adaptable to their existing structural conception and their typological matrix. Using flexible and adaptable facade elements is also important to meet the needs of a constantly changing society. A user-driven and user-oriented design can be the key elements for a design procedure which can reflect and interpret end users’ needs. To reply to some of these architectural and social issues, the paper investigates the possible deployment of advanced volumetric additions that can be smartly adapted to the urban context to meet energy efficiency and safety requirements while satisfying the comfort and needs of urban dwellers. These variable components can be applied in re-designing urban blocks to improve the socio-technical conditions in the dense city centers and in the peripheries. An abacus of solutions that refers to various possibilities and combinations was applied in different case studies of the European contexts, developing a wide set of configurations which might provide a useful procedure to reshape urban buildings with improvements in terms of aesthetic appearance, energy performance, safety, and quality of life.