Reviving Heritage Structures: Sustainable Retrofitting of Dhajji Deewari Buildings
摘要
The restoration/retrofitting of heritage structures is necessary to safeguard the cultural heritage, ensuring safety and functionality to the modern environment. This chapter delves in dhajji deewari heritage buildings—a traditional form of timber-laced masonry construction key to earthquake-prone areas of South Asia, mainly Kashmir and northern Pakistan. Although dhajji deewari structures are globally celebrated for their natural resilience to seismic events, they can serve as vital facets of sustainable construction ideas relevant even today. This chapter discusses retrofitting alternatives to fortify these cultural establishments, without undermining their heritage. Important strategies consist of edge replacement of decayed timber, lightweight strengthening, and the logical incorporation of a modern structural support system that maintains the architecture of the structure and will preserve the structure for many more years. The approach highlights the use of the right materials and the application of minimum intervention techniques to preserve cultural value and, at the same time, enhance the buildings’ capacity for survival in case of seismic disasters. By integrating these retrofitting methods into sustainable building principles, this chapter illustrates how dhajji deewari constructions can meet current safety standards while also being environmentally friendly. These measures are intended to preserve the embodied energy used within such historic structures, yielding results that are both environmentally and culturally critical. Such retrofitting of dhajji deewari buildings gives the best practices and practical consequences are also illustrated by case examples. It also focuses on the significance of policy frameworks and the presence of stakeholders leading to grateful and prosperous heritage protection. The retrofitting of heritage structures must be multidisciplinary and involves engineers, architects, policy-makers and the community at large working together. Finally, through this know-how, the present chapter integrates this experience in order to further contribute into the dialogue of heritage conservation and sustainable retrofitting by demonstrating how the old can meet the modern approach and engineering. Practices such as dhajji deewari can be revived, which serves as a means of building resilient civic infrastructure that respects cultural heritage as well as addressing the challenges of contemporary disaster resilience.