Author(s)

A. Guida, A. Pagliuca & G. Rospi

Abstract

Underground architecture, like the \“Sassi” in Matera, makes people imagine life in the past and reconsider present life in these places \“without time” and how to \“live” them, again like in the \“past”. This scientific research focuses on the quality of indoor living in this particular type of architecture. Today indoor comfort is essential, because 85-90% of time is spent in closed spaces (rooms, work environment, etc.). Closed air, can be for people, more polluting and harmful than open air, as, inside we also have other harmful agents (germs, gas, dust and so on) whose danger is often undervalued. Today it is very important while projecting to consider first of all the quality of indoor air and comfort. The aim of this research is to analyse the thermal and hygrometer performance of underground spaces and to show how traditional Mediterranean masonry offers, also today, a high level of indoor comfort. We did this with tests \“in situ” monitoring indoor comfort (as low requests UNI EN ISO 7730 1997 and UNI EN ISO 7726 2002, by directive CEE n° 106/89). The experiment was verified through the experimental applications in the restoration of two urban buildings in ancient \“Sassi” in Matera, reconverted into hotels, the \“Locanda di S. Martino” and \“Hotel S. Angelo”, that demonstrates as said before and how these building are suitable with the performance requirement that is required from residence environments (European Directive 2002/91/CE and Italian low D.lgs 192/05 – 311/06) even if they are built with traditional technologies. Keywords: comfort indoor, air quality, underground space.

Keywords

comfort indoor, air quality, underground space.