Occupants’ perception of historical buildings’ indoor environment. Two case studies

In Europe, some historical cities have more than 50% of buildings dated from before 1920. Nowadays, these buildings faces challenges when adapted to the current necessities of livability, environmental and economical sustainability. Literature demonstrates that occupants’ comfort perception and consequent behavior affect buildings’ energy efficiency and are influenced also by the building configuration. Despite a large number of studies in literature investigating occupants’ behavior and comfort in different situations, there is a lack of such studies for historical buildings. Therefore, the objective of this paper was to characterize occupants’ thermal and comfort perception in two historical buildings during summer season. In these terms, results of objective measures were compared to occupants’ evaluations of the indoor environment. Results showed that, for both case studies, despite the good thermal performances of the building fabrics and the fact that almost all of the occupants like to work in a historical building (they would also choose it instead of a modern one), most of them didn’t rate the building as comfortable from a thermal point of view.