Historic Climate in Heritage Building and Standard 15757: Proposal for a Common Nomenclature

Kristian Fabbri

doi:10.3390/cli10010004

Abstract

Research on the relationship between microclimate and heritage buildings or historic buildings has increased dramatically in the last few decades. Research has focused on indoor climate or indoor microclimate or the environment or micro-environment, and the field of these studies regards several variables, physical—air temperature, air speed, relative humidity—or chemical, dust, CO2, pollution, etc., all of which can have an effect or damage buildings or artifacts inside buildings. Moreover, all these variables should be monitored in a monitoring campaign following the standard EN 15757; in spite of this, scientific literature contains mistakes with regard to the words and objects of study. In this short contribution, the author proposes a common nomenclature in the research field of climate and microclimate in heritage buildings and heritage artifacts. A new nomenclature should be useful for the community of heritage scientists working on preventive measures to distinguish between climate and environment, or the object of study, e.g., the room (wall, wood structure, fresco, etc.) where the artifacts are or the air around them (painting, canvas, statue, piece of furniture, documents, books, etc.).

Highlights

This paper aims to contribute to a specific research area concerning the study of indoor microclimate in heritage or historic buildings that adopt indoor environmental monitoring following the EN 15757 standard
Scientific literature about heritage and indoor microclimate reports several case studies that follow the EN 15757 standard [6] and their concept of “historic climate” but makes mistakes in the use of these terms. This happens because of a misunderstanding or bias during research and data interpretation, e.g. historic climate is adopted in an article by Camuffo et al [7] in Santa Maria Maddalena, in the Rocca Pietore Church in Italy, where it has been used the standard EN 15757 or in Bertolin et al [8] where the EN 15757 is adopted to evaluate indoor relative humidity fluctuation in the case study of the old choir in S
This section reports a short selection of research on monitoring campaigns of the indoor microclimate on heritage buildings, where they adopt several monitoring campaign periods never longer than a year

Summary

A Short Overview of Scientific Literature

This paper aims to contribute to a specific research area concerning the study of indoor microclimate in heritage or historic buildings (e.g., museums, libraries, etc.) that adopt indoor environmental monitoring following the EN 15757 standard. Scientific literature about heritage and indoor microclimate reports several case studies that follow the EN 15757 standard [6] and their concept of “historic climate” but makes mistakes in the use of these terms This happens because of a misunderstanding or bias during research and data interpretation, e.g. historic climate is adopted in an article by Camuffo et al [7] in Santa Maria Maddalena, in the Rocca Pietore Church in Italy, where it has been used the standard EN 15757 or in Bertolin et al [8] where the EN 15757 is adopted to evaluate indoor relative humidity fluctuation in the case study of the old choir in S. This research field needs to explain and to adopt a specific nomenclature to make clear if the aim of the research concerns the “historic climate” or the “historical indoor microclimate”, the room space or the space around the artifacts, and the display cabinets with artifacts

Observations about the Monitoring Period

G Litti and Audenaert 2018

The Standard EN 15757

Conclusions