Failure analysis of historical buildings due to climate change

Historic buildings have a high resilience in time due to the fact that they were designed by taking into consideration the environment and all the local conditions. However, nowadays not only their environment is changing fast. According to a current climatic change analysis, the climate all over the world has already suffered a severe change and, unfortunately, future scenarios indicate an even worse situation. The main effects of the climate change are as follows: high and long lasting temperatures during summer, precipitation pattern change, intensification of the local winds. To which we can add more intense or even frequent extreme events, such as: drought, abundant precipitation, snowfalls and hailstorms. All these changes have a heavily impact not only on the historic buildings, but also on the economy and society. The main purpose of this study to analyse the climatic change on different types of historic buildings, the way in which natural factors increase the degradation and the failure of the building structures/historic architectural details and how it can affect the aesthetics of the historic urban centres. The subject of the research was a small town in Romania, Oravita, which was chosen due to its diversity of its historical heritage and its special climatic condition. The study focused on simple buildings as well as on archaeological sites, railroads, bridges and dams.