Adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of cultural heritage. A performance-based approach for fire safety

The international debate on sustainable development and the growing need to find new directions for the closure of loops includes architectural issues. The countless abandoned building resources as well as buildings in advanced state of decay highlight the urgent need to extend the life cycle of the building heritage, helping the trade-off between users’ needs and past performance. The commitment to quality is essential to meet the multiple needs of a circular approach in the use of resources and skills, in conservation and enhancement of building heritage values. As the built environment is a key legacy of cultural, economic and social layering, closing loops requires rethinking design processes and strategies. The use of tools and methodologies for the simulation of different intervention scenarios allows reducing the resources needed to design and perform adaptations of existing buildings to new needs. The paper introduces an example of Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) performance-based approach applied to the rehabilitation of abandoned listed heritage buildings. The proposed methodology integrates the FSE in the preliminary design stage, allowing to identify in advance design solutions able to ensure both adequate safety performance requirements for future users, and the preservation of the listed building. The research applied the developed methodology to the case study of the Teatro della Concordia in Ragusa, Sicily, a nineteenth-century building, abandoned in the last decades of the last century. The findings are easy to put into practice, allowing the FSE performance approach to be used at an early stage of the design process.