The museum in historical buildings: Energy and Systems. The project of the Fondazione Musei Senesi

In Italy many museums are located in historical buildings, built originally to host other functions and converted later to museums; with also different typologies, such as historical palaces, castles, farm buildings or monumental sites and with an important cultural value in itself. It highlights that if on one hand the installation of systems answers to fruition needs of the users and conservation needs of the collections displayed, on the other hand such insertion happened fairly recently with solutions in which the sensitivity to the issue of environmental sustainability and energy efficiency wasn't particularly strong. "Energy and Buildings" is nowadays one of the essential binomials in the definition of EU Community Policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at limiting fuel consumption and at encouraging the use of renewable energy sources. In this scenario,the museum buildings can play an important role in reducing the environmental impacts, and also play an active role in the spread of best practices for the citizens and the territory of reference in which they are located. However there are still only few cases where energy retrofit, aimed at enhance sustainability, have been carried out; and especially there are few data, even in the scientific literature, related to energy consumption and the effects in cases of retrofitting. Museum buildings should be refunctionalized on the basis of the needs for the collection care, seeking to optimize the integration of passive and active technological solutions, possibly powered by renewable energy sources, in order to pursue a low environmental impact; indeed for the assets on display, the obtaining of the desired values for indoor environmental quality depends on the balance between the passive energy performance of the building envelope and the one active of the systems. With these premises, the Fondazione Musei Senesi has translated these aspects in the research project "The Museum building: Energy, Systems, Safety&Security", developed involving 43 Museums on the territory of Siena, related to the Fondazione, which lent themselves to play an experimental activity, aimed at exploring the performance of the whole building system and envelope. In particular, the attention has been given to the energy aspects and systems for the indoor climate control to raise the awareness on the operation and maintenance of the museum building. The study was carried out using a self-evaluation form developed ad hoc and an handbook has been developed, written as support to institution managers and owners of museums. The project can be a point of reference for the various and different museums widespread throughout the Italian territory.