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Image source: climatecouncil.org.au

ISCES Symposium: 29 September 2022

Sustainable methods of managing rising temperatures in historic buildings

After a summer of record-breaking temperatures in Europe and rising temperatures worldwide.  Cities and buildings that were previously able to offer people sufficient protection from heat waves thanks to their climate-adapted construction methods are increasingly no longer able to withstand the new weather extremes.  The emerging experiences are increasingly generating concerns about the focus on insulation as the primary method to reduce the energy demand of a building.  Especially in the historic stock when using interior insulation (and thus the “exclusion” of thermal mass), the issue is increasingly discussed.  But the problem of overheating and preserving monuments goes far beyond the insulation question when one thinks of nature-based solutions, for example.

The Symposium aims to discuss methods from around the world of natural and traditional (cultural) cooling methods that may help reduce internal building temperatures and the urban heat island effect. 

The Symposium will be a round table discussion where participants discuss different cooling methods worldwide.  We hope Symposium will produce a list of strategies, or methodologies, that can be distributed by our ISCES members and applied to buildings and urban sites to help in the urgent international effort to mitigate the effect of the global rise in temperatures.

Symposium outline

1. Introduction – Franziska Haas ISCES President

2. Jon Hubert presentation 

3. Khalid EL Harrouni

4. ISCES member round table discussion

5. Conclusion of points raised and follow up 

6. Close

Transcript link TBA

Posted September 2022