QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE GUIDELINES FOR CARBON-NEUTRAL KINDERGARTEN DESIGN IN ITALY

Abstract

In Italy, when building a new school, there are no regulatory or cultural references that consider recent regulations on energy savings and emissions reduction, key environmental considerations that have received increasing notice in society and new teaching methods needs to address these environmental concerns, especially as related to the built environment. The main goal of this paper is to outline qualitative and quantitative guidelines for building low-carbon kindergartens in Italy. These guidelines will define a new building type for schools while also evaluating energy and environmental performance to create a structured and interdisciplinary support tool that can be used by designers during the preliminary phase of the design process. The method starts from the detailed analysis of representative sustainable buildings to define new typological models, then several energy and environmental analyses follow to evaluate the new building type performance, and finally the guidelines are detailed following the environmental and technological system.