More than three quarters of all consumed energy in buildings are used for heating, ventilation and sanitary hot water preparation. Energy conservation on these areas has a great potential for reduction of fossil fuels consumption and could greatly contribute to environmental assessment. In striving for reduction of energy use in buildings new criteria are enforced as a measure for energy use in buildings.

Reconstruction of late 19 th century building for new Slovene Ethnographic Museum is presented. Interventions into building envelope and heating, cooling and lighting system from exhibits and visitors comfort and rational use of energy point of view were treated in the framework of EU and SI research programmes. An innovative heating-cooling system have been designed and tested.

The Portuguese National Museum for Archaeology is undergoing an expansion and retrofitting. It is currently housed in one of the most important ancient monuments in Portugal: the Monastery of Jernimos. The authorities responsible for the museum, taking advantage of this retrofitting, decided to promote a modern and integrated design of the future archaeological museum. The architectural design aims to combine, aesthetically, the old and the new building, promoting sustainable architecture and energy efficiency (concerning, essentially, indoor climate, lighting and acoustical requirements).

A important part of educational buildings must be retrofitted in many European countries, in the next years, for historical and demographic reasons. These retrofittings must be carried out with a limitation of energy consumption and a better indoor comfort. In this context, Annex 36 of International Energy Agency aims at promoting energy efficient measurements of educational buildings in the retrofitting process. In the same time, in France, decision makers want to integrate high environmental quality comfort requirements.

Within an Italian Experimental Programme an interdisciplinary research for the retrofitting of some residential buildings in the surrounding of Florence has been carried out. The activity of the experimental research concerns the methodological and scientific support to the technical solutions for the restoration of two buildings.

Energy conservation represents a main concern for the environmental, economical and social problems. In this field, educational buildings are large consumer of energy and in many countries need retrofits. In this paper, we propose an energy certification procedure for educational buildings which aims to improve learning and teaching environment while reducing energy consumption. The developed procedure is composed of different levels including a phase of diagnosis and then a phase of calculation of the energy consumption and the energy conservation possibilities.

Approximately 300 low energy houses have been built in the Republic of Ireland by the multi-national CRH Plc and South Dublin County Council as part of a co-ordinated European Commission-supported demonstration project, RE-Start (Renewable Energies Strategies and Technology Applications for Regenerating Towns).

Insufficient concern about energy efficiency during the design and/or the operation of a building is the main reason for the high energy consumption of existing buildings. The knowledge of facility managers about the real energy consumption is often poor, regular documentation or analysis of consumption data are not existing. Enerkenn therefore intents to develop a procedure to record and evaluate relevant energy data and to find out energy saving potentials with environmentally conscious and economically reasonable accuracy.

The central subject of this Workshop was the challenge offered by energy performance regulations to find adequate solutions for the integration of innovative technologies in such regulations.

The thesis deals with human perception of the environment, sick building symptoims and the performance of office work in the indoor environment. Single and combined effects of temperature, heat stress, noise and air quality have been studied in three experiments.