Concerns regarding the shortage of energy, rising demands, and the effect of irrational use have made the topic of energy savings and sustainable design almost ubiquitous. Sustainable design and historic preservation offer opportunities of mutual development: reusing materials, rediscovering and capitalizing on buildings’ sustainable attributes, and inserting new efficient systems into it.

The Cyprus Institute undertook an energy study and design interventions to the Cyprus Presidential Palace with the objective to develop solutions to retrofit the historically and politically important building towards Net-Zero-Energy-Buildings (ZEB), i.e., a building that applies intensive energy-conservation measures and uses its own renewable energy-generating sources to produce, over a certain period of time, the same power it consumes. The project evaluated a series of high energy-efficient innovative technologies and measures in the Cyprus Presidential Palace and documented the proposal generation of the retrofit solutions for this historic monument.

The complex was seriously damaged on July 15, 1974 during the coup. Most of the structure was burned down, except the standing stonewalls. The Public Works Department, and the Philippou Brothers architectural firm restored the Presidential Palace in 1977. Since then, it has been continuously used to house the official office and residence of the Republic’s President.

The building’s energy performance and indoor environmental quality were evaluated via monitoring and simulation. The monitoring included the following measurements: Indoor air quality measurements using tracer gas; Particulate matter measurements; Indoor temperature and relative humidity measurements; outdoor climatic conditions; thermal imaging of the building envelope; indoor illuminance measurements; and collection of energy consumption bills and data.

In the end, ten energy efficiency measures for the Presidential Palace project were selected and tested. The integration and combination of these solutions in a carefully designed manner lead to the desired ZEB and the proposed architectural interventions, measures and scenarios were analyzed and tabulated in a final report.