Performance optimisation of the building envelope. Case studies on recently constructed residential buildings in the United Kingdom.

In the UK, the policy and practical pushes for both new housing and carbon are achieving massive growth in the available stock and huge reductions in energy consumption per unit. The enormous new stock, however, will be almost immediately be outdated by the arrival of the more restrictive rules under “The Future Homes Standard”. These events are a mirror image of the current and near-future ones occurring in all the nations of the European Union. The construction industries and real-estate sectors of all these nations are confronted with the looming obligations of retrofitting the housing just completed or even still in creation, in order to achieve the obligatory energy classes. In this light, the research reported addresses the need for short and long-term strategies adequate to the reworking our recently constructed buildings. The methodological approach is applied to the cases of two residential buildings recently built in the framework of an urban regeneration plan for northern England.