COLOUR AND LIGHT IN THE REQUALIFICATION, REGENERATION, AND VALORISATION OF RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS

A PRIN research (Research Program of National Interest) which involved four Italian universities: Ferrara, Turin, Chieti-Pescara, Venice, has just been completed. The research theme concerned the “Requalification, regeneration and valorization of intensive social housing settlements built in the suburbs in the second half of the Twentieth Century”. Within the Venetian Research Unit, the three authors have dealt with the “Environmental quality as result of requalification, regeneration and valorization of the building envelope skin”, focusing their attention on how environmental regeneration is achieved through technological, chromatic and lighting interventions, aimed to improve the last physical frontier of the building. The case study used as a reference for the test and the validation of the obtained results is a medium-large scale intervention, located in the city of Verona, in Zancle street. The authors carried out on the intervention all the required simulations to verify as the only chromatic and lighting improvement of the last physical frontier of the buildings is capable of generating a significant environmental improvement that reverberates, as well as on the building itself, on the surrounding areas and on the entire neighborhood. The issue involves not only Italy. A good number of European countries have a large architectural heritage that needs to be requalified, regenerated and valorized, i.e. brought to an overall condition of adjustment to the current standard of living. These buildings, some of them once the expression of the most advanced instances of design and construction, today represent the symbol of certain conditions of decay and inefficiency that characterize the contemporary city. To improve their environmental quality, the authors carried out a scientific research that has satisfactorily demonstrated that the most significant interventions from an environmental point of view, obtained by color and light use, give significant social consequences, taking place around the interface called: architectural envelope. Here the architectural envelope is not conceived as a functional package, but as an external boundary, in which the technologies that make use of color and light are capable of ensuring the building quality and ameliorate the environment where it is placed, as well as to provide an adequate protection to the functional layers underneath. Today, this external boundary has considerably evolved: since the skin of buildings has become active, adapting to external environmental conditions, the relationship with the outside and the materials that underlie gave to this external boundary functions that are most similar to an interface than to a passive element which future is degradation and to be destroyed. Today, all the interventions relating to the architectural envelope can produce drastic effects on the improvement of the environmental quality of the entire building and its surroundings: better energy performances, better environmental and appearance performances, life extension and increased value of the asset. A better explication of the results will be clarified on the final paper.