External Insulation Systems for Buildings with Complex Façades in Urban Historic Centers

Abstract

Despite it is an urgent need for at least 20 years, the energy efficiency of the unlisted buildings in the historic centers of European cities, and especially of the Italian ones, is still an unrecovered issue. In particular, the strategy of the Exterior Insulation and Finishing System (EIFS, in Italy often called “thermo-insulating coat”), which proved to be very useful if applied to a certain type of building, is instead inapplicable in the historic centers of Italian cities for several reasons. One of the reasons is that, with the exclusion of the listed historical-artistic heritage, the application of an external insulating coating on a building with particularly decorated, or discontinuous, façades is very complex due to the difficult adherence between the panels of traditional EIFS and the decorative elements of the façades, such as friezes, projections, string courses, cornices, and other decorative elements. Moreover, especially in historic centers of the Italian cities, due to the small size of the space and its profitability, the costs of occupying public soils for scaffolding, necessary for the construction of EIFS, are always higher. To this we must also add the costs of managing full-height scaffolding over time, both in terms of safety for operators and security for the anti-intrusion in homes and offices. The paper, in addition to proposing a survey on the state of the art of external insulating systems, investigating case studies such as, for example, the Northern European experimentation Energiesprong, identifies some of the most interesting solutions in the field of automated building prefabrication (called “Industry 4.0”), coming to outline, as like conclusions, the main technical and executive aspects of an original and innovative system.