Sustainable Reuse and Maintenance Strategies in Preservation of the Cultural Heritage

The reuse of building heritage is a main strategy to assure the sustainable growth of our cities. In the field of the cultural heritage, the reuse plays a strategic role in urban renewal, as intervention produces positive effects on the conservation of the historic building, and reduces the costs of both restoration and management. Recent studies show that public and private purchasers do not apply procedures for the evaluation of feasibility of reuse, in order to control the impact of intervention on the building. New uses of buildings, not selected on the basis of adequate preliminary evaluation, usually produce unsatisfactory results. The proposed research defines a methodology for the evaluation of new uses, compatible with the building performance and its perceptive, morphological and technological features, respecting, at the same time, the requirements of the new use. The method is focused on the analysis of the physical, economic and social condition in the building area to identify the activities to be settled in the building, in order to guarantee the sustainable upon time. A procedure was developed, carrying out a path that defines the successive steps of comparison (building/new use) and the adjusting operations to the functions through feedback. The case of the ???Real Albergo de??? Poveri??? (Royal Alms House) in Naples will be tested to describe complexity of intervention choices for historic buildings of huge dimensions. The enhancement of the main buildings through the reuse strategy in the urban context can lead to activate socio-economic development processes on a larger scale. In fact, the building, conceived as a small city closed away from the external town, is a symbol of the city of Naples. It is located near the historical and cultural center and can to play a strategic role for the sustainable development of the city. The paper defines guidelines for the reuse design of the historical building, in which the need to manage both choices of materials and traditional building techniques is related to the durability prevision and the behaviour of a building system subject to new use. This strategy could give rise a process that guarantees the preservation of the cultural heritage and an efficient management of maintenance for handing over the building to the future generation.