Dear Colleagues,

In the last decades, research and construction industry focuses on energy efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions reduction. By definition, an energy efficient building aims at minimizing its energy demand and maximizing its renewable energy sources (RES) harvesting. However, in a user-centered vision, its most important goal is guaranteeing as much as possible the occupants’ well-being, comfort and health while being energy efficient.

During its life span, a building might experience several unpredictable external changes which might undermine its capability of ensuring the occupants’ indoor comfort and health. In 2020, such a user-centered design was significantly affected by the ongoing COVID19 pandemic at least in two ways. Firstly, many buildings have proven to be unable to protect their occupants’ health for instance for the impossibility of adapting their ventilation system with an affordable cost. Secondly, a large-scale imposed smart/home working is showing how affordable, but too small, houses in big cities are unsuitable as place for both work/study and private life.

The resilience of a building in ensuring occupants' health & comfort might then be put in test also by other events such as increasingly more frequent natural disasters connected to climate change (e.g. large wildfires near to highly populated areas, torrential rains in formerly drier areas, very high speed winds in previously milder zones, overheating, etc.), or, more simply, by changes in use of the building that were unpredictable when this was designed or renovated.

Faster (e.g. pandemic crisis) and slower (e.g. climate and socio-demographic changes) unforeseeable, but possible, relevant variations of a building context should make us drastically re-think the way in which buildings are designed and used for private life and work. The readiness of buildings for reacting to short-and-intense or longer-lasting external unexpected conditions (and hence the buildings’ resilience in ensuring occupants’ health and comfort) depends on how they are designed or requalified.

The first step to design more resilient buildings is the analysis of the performances of existing buildings under unpredictable external changes. The aim is to understand which configurations proven to be more robust and why.

Hence, the purpose of this Sustainability Special Issue is collect studies based on data from real buildings (e.g. post-occupancy evaluation questionnaires, monitoring, other questionnaires and surveys, etc.) that show if and how buildings can adapt to ensure durable optimal indoor conditions considering thermal comfort, visual and acoustic environment (indoor lighting and sound scape), air quality and overall well-being towards regenerative living place. Moreover, a well-designed and operated resilient building brings private and public benefit, and should therefore have a higher real estate value. Hence, studies that provide evidence on whether the market appraisals resilience are welcome. For instance, this might be based on an analysis of the building stock and the comparison between standard and novel building configurations.

This special issue will therefore contribute to address research questions such as:

• Which characteristics make a building more resilient?
• Are these characteristics linked to the use (residential, offices, etc.) of the building? Or are there any key features that apply to almost any type of use?
• Do these characteristics depend on the external unpredictable event (pandemic, natural disaster, etc.)? Or are there any key features that apply to almost any unpredictable event?

Does the market value building resilience to external unpredictable event?

Dr. Roberto Lollini
Dr. Francesco Babich
Guest Editors

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• building resilience
• indoor environmental quality (IEQ)
• unpredictable external events
• COVID19
• climate change
• overheating
• building monitoring
• post occupancy evaluation (POE) surveys
• indoor health
• occupants behaviours
• building resilience market appraisal