Adaptive Reuse in Heritage Buildings of Mediterranean For the Implementation of Sustainable Development: Through Environmental Dimensions

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the crucial tool fronts of the challenges like climate changes in 21st century. Sustainable developments deal with three dimensions or levels, which are; environment, society and economy. Adaptive reuse of buildings plays a key role in the sustainable development of the communities. It brings about environmental benefits significantly. Heritage buildings offer many advantages on the landscape, identity of the communities and amenity to the urban context. One of the main benefits of reusing buildings environmentally is the keeping of the building original “embodied energy”. By reusing the heritage buildings, the embodied energy of these building will be retained, hence, creating much more environmentally sustainable project, than new construction projects. New construction projects will have higher embodied energy costs than buildings that are adaptively re-used. Along with that, adaptive re-used of heritage buildings will save lands, money through financial saving returns and enhance the functionality of the existing buildings. The paper aims to reduce the impact of climate changes and reach better environment through the adaptive re-use in Heritage buildings. The quantitative method will be approached, and historical buildings as case study will be selected from North Cyprus, and the life cycle materials will be evaluated based on literature survey and theoretical analysis with the help of LEED rating system. Qualitative method through questioning of expert people will be approached too. Comparison between the findings from both ways will be carried out and the result will be extrapolated. Different materials, techniques, and architectural strategies will be analyzed and recommended, based on their impacts on the environment for optimizing the environmental effects of these buildings. The results retrying to reach a comprehensive understanding about the efficiency of adaptive re-use methods for the heritage buildings simultaneously with the climatic characteristic, and establish guidelines for that.