Preventive and Planned Maintenance of Protected Buildings. Methodological Tools For the Development of Inspection Activities and Maintenance Plans

With this paper, the Authors' aim is to share at international level the experiences of planned maintenance and decay prevention of historic buildings, in particular listed ones, gained on a unique cultural heritage such as the Italian one. The issue is certainly not new: it has been known and accepted, for several decades, that prevention and constant maintenance are preferable to occasional and certainly more destructive restoration activities. The principal tool to guarantee the best conservation of buildings is the Maintenance Plan. This is aimed at the prevention of decay, caused by both natural and human activity, with mitigation activities applied to environmental context and ways of usage. Within the Plan, the maintenance activities have the purpose of monitoring the state of conservation and to ensure timely interventions on potential effects of decay, through low intensity activities that must be frequent and continuous. The continuous emergencies, due either to environmental or human impact or to lacking maintenance, have highlighted in recent years the requirement for more detailed consideration on the issue of preventive conservation of built cultural heritage; in particular, the urgent need for immediately implementable methodological tools. With the aim of providing concrete solutions to these requirements, this paper presents (within a theoretical context) the results of decades of study and research by the Authors, as well as a recent two-year experimental activity. The documents that have been produced have been validated following experiences in the practical field. These relevant and diverse experimentations have allowed continuous refinements on the process. Therefore, in virtue of these observations, it is to be hoped that, once their general outlines have been shared, the contents and methodological approach presented here will find many other significant field applications to then enable further necessary improvements and optimizations in the light of experience.