Partition walls in Venetian traditional buildings. Analysis instruments and solutions for their preservation and improvement of performances

ABSTRACT Preserving cultural heritage doesn’t simply imply handing down the image of a building as a whole, it also means safeguarding its material nature through knowing its construction-related features. The need to make buildings meet present-day requirements as regards acoustic and thermal performances must come to terms with the demand of preserving what has been built, avoiding marring its features. This is particularly felt in Italy, since most of the buildings in historical towns were built before the nineteen century. The object of the research is studying plastered wooden-structure partition walls to be found in brick-work Venetian buildings with a view of their refurbishment and conservation. Such walls, consisting in boards and wooden strips (scorzoni and cantinelle) play an important functional and construction-related role inside Venetian buildings. The resort to other materials unconnected with Venetian building tradition has often led to their being substituted with walls built according to more up-to-date techniques which has caused the loss of historical identity as well as quite different thermal-acoustic, rigidity and weight performances. The paper presents the first results of the construction-related analysis of the existing walls and some guidelines aiming to improve their performances, at the same time making their preservation viable.