THE DILEMMA BETWEEN CONSERVATION AND INNOVATION FOR MONUMENTAL BUILDINGS

Bridging Energy Efficiency and Cultural Heritage: a Case Study of Monumental Buildings’ Energy Transition in Amsterdam’s City Center

This thesis examines the intersection of cultural heritage preservation and energy efficiency for Amsterdam’s monumental buildings, focusing on the challenges and opportunities of retrofitting this part of the building stock to achieve the city’s ambitious energy neutrality goals by 2040. The built environment significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions due to their obsolete technologies and their envelopes not realized accordingly to contemporary habits, with monumental buildings posing unique challenges due to stringent conservation policies that limits the range of intervention over them. Despite the European Union’s, Dutch and Amsterdam’s efforts to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, these historic structures are often exempt from energy efficiency requirements to preserve their aesthetic and structural integrity. This mainly affects the city centre of Amsterdam where most of the buildings are protected as monuments to conserve their original aspect. The dilemma lies in the efforts to promote energy transition for these buildings: while the Municipality aims to facilitate this transition, existing conservation policies impose restrictions that limit the range of intervention possible, making retrofitting both costly and complex. This research, employing the Multi-Level Perspective framework for the transition of these two systems in interaction, examines the policy and practical barriers to integrating energy efficiency measures in monumental buildings. Together with a case study on an Orde 1 classified building, it demonstrates the potential for significant energy savings. The findings indicate that redefining policies is essential to guarantee flexibility by broadening the range of possible interventions and aligning energy and cultural heritage objectives, in which the Municipality plays a pivotal role in this transition as it is involved in three key steps: delineating policies for both cultural heritage and energy, providing advisory services, and controlling the process by approving or denying the Environmental Permit necessary for any intervention on monumental buildings.