On May 7–9 2025, the FuturHist team gathered for our third in-person project meeting, this time in Kraków – the city hosting one of our demonstration sites. We’re at an important stage in the project: having just completed Work Package 1, “Drawing the baseline”, it was the right moment to reflect on initial outcomes and plan our next steps in detail.
Discussing work in progress
Our project has been running for 17 months, giving us a solid understanding of our direction. We have finalised six reports on barriers, policy framework, the current practice of renovation, building typologies, existing guidelines and tools for energy retrofits in historic buildings, and performance assessment. They gave us a broad perspective on the context in which we are working. We also achieved the first milestones. First was selecting the nine building typologies, an important step in implementing our ambition to shift the focus from individual buildings to building typologies. The other was distinguishing the key performance indicators used in FuturHist to guide and evaluate energy retrofit strategies for historic buildings. The three days we spent in Kraków were filled with discussions on our progress, retrofit strategies for our five demo cases and the next steps ahead. Much of our work took place in a workshop setting, enabling us to make the most of partner contributions in a collaborative and focused way. Zarząd Budynków Komunalnych (Municipal Buildings Authority) organised the meeting with Politechnika Krakowska’s (Cracow University of Technology) support. Thank you, both organisations, for such a warm welcome!
