Combining conservation and visitors’ fruition for sustainable building heritage use: Application to a hypogeum

The exploitation of Building Heritage generally leads to sustainability issues in terms of environmental preservation and tourist enjoyment. When these requirements are not jointly respected, occupancy issues can provoke degradation phenomena on indoor environment (i.e., building materials and surfaces with artistic and historical value) or conditions of discomfort during visitors’ fruition. Hence, our research defines a combined strategy to solve at the same time both the issues: guaranteeing the conservation of Building Heritage (and its artefacts) while ensuring optimal visitors’ fruition tasks. The Building Heritage conservation is pursued by a monitoring campaign of ideal (undisturbed) indoor conditions and by the evaluation of the human presence effect considering thermal loads as main driver. The visitors’ fruition is analyzed by assessing individuals’ behavioral patterns in terms of attention given to the hosted artifacts (where and how the visitors’ attention is posed?), through a wearable eye tracking system. The strategy is applied to a hypogeum environment characterized by high reliefs on walls and vaults. This scenario is considered since its isolated hygrothermal conditions are strongly influenced by human presence. Results showed that the environmental preservation is reached when considering the fruition model proposed by the stakeholder. Furthermore, the eye tracking analysis revealed high-level of visitors’ engagement towards significant spaces only when exposed to adequate lighting conditions and/or in a good conservation state.