Conserving the Past for the Future: supporting sustainable rehabilitation of Existing/Historic Buildings

教科文组织关于文化促进可持续城市发展的全球报告强调，在北美，城市可持续发展对话本身倾向于优先考虑新建筑，而不是老旧的遗产建筑。人们未能认识到老城区的价值，尽管它们具有内在的韧性。历史建筑一直被专业人士批评为能源不足或结构不健全，这些假设往往是未经证实的。为了简单地说明加拿大现有/遗产的规模，在加拿大财政局秘书处上查询“1676至1968年间建造的联邦所有的建筑”，就会得到超过17,000处房产。这些物业可能会受到联邦遗产建筑审查委员会(FHBRO)的审查和指定(目前指定了3000多个地点)，以及联邦遗产建筑所需的修复方法。此外，根据加拿大自然资源部门的数据，大约有5,460,000所住宅的历史比1977年要早。目前的研究计划专注于为现有建筑开发数字工作--OWS，特别是为能够为可持续发展方面的开创性政策做出贡献的遗产场所开发数字工作。这将通过以下方式实现：(1)编写一份报告，评估在了解现有和遗产地的能量和结构性能的定性和定量方法方面的最新水平；(2)开发一些数字化作品，即利用选定的试点案例研究进行记录、分析和可视化；以及(3)制定数字化工作的指导方针和协议，以增进对现有建筑物和遗产地的了解。此外，将使用数字保存平台(Dataverse)来确保收集和处理的数据的寿命，以便未来其他研究人员可以使用这一平台。该项目将为研究生和本科生提供一个绝佳的多学科研究培训机会，这些学生将在土木工程和环境工程、数字媒体和人机交互领域得到很好的考虑。

The UNESCO Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Urban Development, emphasizes that in North America, the urban sustainability dialogue itself has tended to prioritize new construction rather than older heritage buildings. There has been a failure to recognize the values of older urban areas, despite their inherent resilience. Historic buildings have been criticized by professionals as being energy-inef?cient or structurally unsound, assumptions which are often uncorroborated. To provide a simple illustration of the magnitude of existing/heritage places in Canada, a query on the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat about "federally owned buildings constructed between 1676 and 1968" yields over 17,000 properties. These properties are potentially subject to Federal Heritage Buildings Review Of?ce (FHBRO) review and designation (with over 3,000 places currently designated) and the required rehabilitation approach mandated for Federal Heritage Buildings. Furthermore, according to Natural Resources Canada, about 5,460,000 dwellings are older than 1977. The current research program focuses on developing digital work?ows for existing buildings, in particular for heritage places that can contribute to ground-breaking policies in sustainability. This will be accomplished by: (1) preparing a report evaluating the state-of-the-art in dealing with qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding the energy and structural performance of existing and heritage places; (2) developing a number of digital work?ows to record, analyse and visualize using selected pilot case studies; and (3) producing guidelines and protocols for digital work?ows to improve the understanding of existing buildings and heritage places. Furthermore, the use of a digital preservation platform (dataverse) will be used to ensure the longevity of the data collected, and processed, so other researchers in the future can use that. The program will provide an excellent opportunity for multidisciplinary research training for graduate and undergraduate students that will become well accounted with the areas of civil and environmental engineering, digital media, and human-computer interactions.