Heritage Buildings: Latest Advances and Prospects, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

The conservation of heritage buildings is confronted with increasingly complex challenges arising from the interaction of material ageing, climate change, evolving patterns of use, and more stringent requirements for structural safety, environmental performance, accessibility, and occupant well-being. Extending the service life of existing buildings and enabling their compatible adaptation are therefore strategic components of both heritage conservation and construction-sector decarbonisation. When supported by rigorous assessment, the continued use of the existing built stock can reduce replacement, land take, raw-material demand, construction waste, and embodied greenhouse-gas emissions.

Meeting these objectives requires a more advanced understanding of historic construction, including material properties, structural behaviour, deterioration kinetics, environmental exposure, and the effects of previous interventions. It also requires methods capable of transforming incomplete, heterogeneous, and multiscale evidence into reliable models of current condition and future performance.

Artificial intelligence is expanding the capacity to combine documentary, experimental, monitoring, imaging, and simulation data; identify latent deterioration patterns; support inverse analysis and model updating; and develop predictive maintenance strategies. Its application to heritage buildings nevertheless raises specific methodological and ethical requirements. Data representativeness, model interpretability, uncertainty quantification, validation, reproducibility, and decision traceability must be addressed explicitly. AI-assisted assessment should augment expert reasoning rather than replace it, preserving human oversight and integrating scientific evidence with historical, technical, material, craft, and community knowledge.

Heritage buildings must consequently be investigated as time-dependent systems in which material degradation, structural response, hygrothermal conditions, indoor environments, patterns of use, and cultural significance are closely coupled. Climate non-stationarity further complicates their assessment by modifying exposure conditions, accelerating deterioration mechanisms, and increasing the probability of compound and cascading hazards. Progress in this field depends on the integration of material characterisation, non-destructive testing, structural and environmental monitoring, computational modelling, probabilistic assessment, and long-term observation.

Intervention design requires an equally integrated framework. Structural safety, compatibility, durability, reversibility, energy efficiency, hygrothermal behaviour, indoor environmental quality, accessibility, health, comfort, embodied and operational carbon, and resource use cannot be optimised independently. Performance-based and multi-criteria approaches are needed to quantify trade-offs, compare alternative solutions, and prevent improvements in one domain from adversely affecting another. Experimental validation and post-intervention monitoring are also essential for assessing actual performance and refining future design criteria.

This second edition seeks original research that connects advanced knowledge with technically sound and responsible conservation practice. It welcomes theoretical, experimental, computational, and field-based contributions addressing artificial intelligence, diagnostic and monitoring technologies, climate-induced deterioration, multi-hazard resilience, compatible and innovative materials, structural and environmental retrofit, adaptive reuse, circularity, life-cycle assessment, material passports, and long-term asset management. Particular attention will be given to studies that explicitly address uncertainty, validate methods on real heritage buildings, compare intervention scenarios, and provide measurable evidence of benefits for both heritage significance and human well-being.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Artificial intelligence, including generative AI, for heritage assessment and decision support, with particular attention to data reliability, model transparency, uncertainty, and human-in-the-loop approaches;
2. Integrated diagnosis and monitoring of material, structural, and environmental conditions;
3. Deterioration processes and durability under present and future climate conditions;
4. Vulnerability and resilience of heritage buildings to seismic, climatic, and combined hazards;
5. Compatible and durable materials for conservation and repair;
6. Performance-based strategies for structural, energy, and environmental upgrading;
7. Adaptive reuse in relation to heritage significance, accessibility, and occupant well-being;
8. Life-cycle approaches to carbon emissions, resource use, circularity, material traceability, maintenance, and long-term management.

We welcome original research articles, critical reviews, methodological contributions, and rigorously documented case studies. We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Graziella Bernardo
Prof. Dr. Luis Palmero-Iglesias
Guest Editors

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