Sustainable Recovery of Architectural Heritage: The Experience of a Worksite School in San Salvador

Abstract

This paper presents the experience of both interdisciplinary and sustainable implementation of an educational construction site for the recovery of the architectural heritage in Central America. Rey Prendes House is representative of one hundred and forty-five houses made of wood, stamped steel sheet, and deployé that are located in the historical center of San Salvador. Its origin is linked to historical events, such as the strong migration of foreigners to El Salvador in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the presidential decrees that encouraged the reconstruction of the city with anti-seismic materials as a result of the earthquakes of 1873 and 1917. More recently, since 2017, Rey Prendes House has been included in the project funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation. In this paper, the phases of the survey are documented with both materials and degradation analyses, the new design construction with BIM technology for the organization of the educational construction site, the creation of offices and laboratories for restoration and treatments of timber and metal details. Moreover, the study provides a contextual framework with the aim of describing the policies and the projects implemented, highlighting the adopted strategies, the results achieved, and outlining the path followed towards the design solutions for sustainable rehabilitation relating to future use.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) Driven Sustainable Cultural Heritage Tourism

“…The results in Figure 4, Figure 6, and Figure 7 indicate that culture is a recurrent keyword and co-occurs with management and conservation. However, a number of studies have focused on the physical conservation [67], risk prediction [23], and engineering modifications of architectural heritage [28], with less emphasis on the cultural values that underpin them. Reconstruction of the site is easy, but restoring the true cultural heritage is the challenge [16].…”

“…As shown in Table 1, the case study [10,16,23,35,52,[66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74] is the most employed research method, which reveal that the main architectural heritage conservation measures are prevention, treatment, restoration, revitalisation, and reconstruction. Preventive conservation is the most effective conservation measure [59] since it prevents or reduces the occurrence of damage [47], lowering the cost of keeping the built heritage [81].…”

HBIM-Based Decision-Making Approach for Sustainable Diagnosis and Conservation of Historical Timber Structures

“…The use of HBIM is more suitable for the design of new buildings rather than the restoration of existing buildings, so some simplifications have been made without the insertion of local damage. The digitization of damage and injuries for wood elements is currently not feasible in HBIM [51].…”

Problems and Technical Issues in the Diagnosis, Conservation, and Rehabilitation of Structures of Historical Wooden Buildings with a Focus on Wooden Historic Buildings in Poland

“…In some cases, it is possible to identify the structure hidden inside the walls and ceilings using thermal imaging cameras. Exemplary case studies of properly developed inspection, survey, and documentation projects are presented in [31,32].…”