Impact of Maintenance, Rehabilitation, and Other Interventions on Functionality of Heritage Buildings

The maintenance of heritage buildings can be extremely complex; usually, practitioners face many difficult decisions regarding when and how to intervene. The data recovered over time of the conservation and rehabilitation of heritage buildings could represent a new input to aid stakeholders' decision-making concerning an efficient planning of the maintenance activities to carried out during the buildings' service life. This study evaluated the impact of maintenance activities in the functionality of heritage buildings through the analysis of historical records concerning the maintenance activities performed on a set of heritage buildings from the 13th and 14th centuries through the 21st century. A sample of 390 historical records were analyzed, recovered from a set of 20 parish churches in the province of Seville in southern Spain. This study assessed the variations observed in the functional service life (buildings' performance) of the heritage buildings under analysis according to the different interventions and maintenance actions performed over time. The knowledge of the past behavior of the constructions over time and the impact of the different maintenance activities performed allowed finding some patterns in the data. The results obtained in this study, and the lessons learned from past actions, allow promoting the increase of the stakeholders' knowledge concerning the impact of maintenance activities in heritage buildings, thus aiding the adoption of more technically informed and sustainable maintenance actions in the future.