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

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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.