Beyond Cultural and Historic Values, Sustainability as a New Kind of Value for Historic Buildings
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper presents a very interesting assessment of the needs to improve the energy efficiency and indoor environment quality (IEQ) of protected historical buildings.
The subject is worth to be published by Sustainability. The paper is well organized and written. The methodology is suitably described and the results are properly presented and discussed.
This reviewer recommends that authors consider the following corrections/comments:
- A more detailed discussion of the IEQ aspects of the study case presented in the paper would be useful to readers, since authors emphasize the importance of such aspect in their paper.
- Table 1, line 7, K in place of k.
- Table 2 is not mentioned in the text.
- All software cited in the text should be included in the References.
- The colours of Fig. 5 should be explained.
- Every picture of Fig. 6 should be identified.
- Items 3.2.4 and 3.2.5 require some pictures/schemes to be better understood.
- One cannot read properly the information contained in Fig. 9.
- Line 586, authors mean intend instead of pretend, Ok?
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we are very grateful to your comments which have helped to improve our paper. We have answered each comment in the attached file.
Yours sincerely,
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper refer to
Regarding energy simulation you wrote that the construction configuration of the building is hard to determine without an in-depth diagnosis. What do you me as n with that? Probably the reading of two review paper on data input and model validation / calibration in historic building can help to express better these concept: doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.109509; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2020.107081. You wrote: Moreover, few studies analyse a method that reflects user behaviour. Are you sure if that? You can search “user centered design approach” and “user behavior” in historic building both on Elsevier and mdpi platform. Recently (last year) other paper have been published in that. Reference 47 is not a guideline but a standard. It is really different. Reference 48 is the starting point from 47, that was born departing from Effesus project. For this reason, several papers (not only 48) have been published on this topic by Roberti F., Eriksson P. and Esquiza A. On IEQ you wrote: “These factors have a direct impact on users’ health”. These aspects impact also in the preventive conservation of the building. The difficulty is to balance conservation of heritage value, human comfort and energy efficiency. I suggest to deep improve this part, as heritage value conservation is a specific point of IEQ considering the preventive conservation approach. In row 261-262 you wrote: “Few authors have developed a method or guide to combine both objectives and this way close the gap resulting from legislation exemptions”. This is not true. The study of Webb is old (many paper have been published after that) and also is not well referenced considering European studies (is US centered). As Europe as a long tradition on it, I suggest to write that there are several recent studies on it especially in sensitive buildings, like museum or libraries, citing the most important. The news sentence is not finished (row 263). It is senseless . Also ref 50 do non develop a method, but it is a synthesis of Italian legislation of energy efficiency of heritage building (and some parts of legislation are changed). Thus this part, as a literature review is not adeguate. As methodological framework, it is not clear the link with the case study. It is better to describe the methodology and than validate it in the case study. Right now, the vote if the paper is not understandable.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we are very grateful to your comments which have helped so much to improve our paper. We have answered each comment in the attached file.
Yours sincerely,
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
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