The High School "Giustino Fortunato" in Rionero in Vulture (Potenza, Italy): how to refurbish an higher education institute made in brutalist architecture of ‘80, leading it to be a NZEB and preserving its formal features

This study is about a building which was built after the 1980's earthquake in Campania and Basilicata, as USAID gift, in Paul Rudolph’s style, with external walls made in facing concrete, without insulation and lacking of flashings and of downpipe so much, to look, after twenty-five years, as a ruin; with very thin cover for reinforcement, and so with widespread pathologies of spalling of carbonated concrete; with roof wrongly designed; windows partly too little for a good dayligting and too exposed to dazzling; internal walls per 80% not performing acoustic performances fixed by standards, and all greater spaces (atrium and corridors, library, auditorium, sports hall) with reverberation time many times the standard value. The building is awful from thermal point of view: it disperses 76,7 kWh/m3 year, and places itself in the worse class of actual Italian thermic rules. His management become ever more expensive: so this study has the aim of demonstrating how to find a remedy to design faults and to existing pathologies, upgrading the building to an NZEB, which produces from renewable sources the energy he need, without disfigure his formal configuration. The solutions developed can serve as “rules of the art” for refurbishment of brutalist architecture.