Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

This study provides an analysis of the trajectory of heritage interventions, highlighting the difficulties in dealing with the reuse of preexisting structures in Brazilian historical centers and its repercussion in the contemporary scenario of the central areas. The hypothesis assumed here goes beyond the historicist rigidity that inhibits the “recontextualization of architecture”, but seeks to highlight the difficulty in developing projects within existing contexts, reinterpreting preexistences and questioning them. The specialization of the center and the loss of its residential function are common to all Brazilian historical sites and are always associated with a number of factors: the industrialization process, demographic expansion, the formation of urban peripheries, and the presence of the State, either by interventions in the road and transport system, or by mechanisms of urban planning legislation. These actions are usually accompanied by a growing association of the center with the image of “tourist site” or “historical site” which, if on the one hand promotes a symbolic reference, on the other signifies its condemnation to a place removed from the life of the city. Attempts to confine historic centers end up conferring on them a “non-historical” character, inasmuch as they tend to suppress their density and identity, attributes which result precisely from the superposition and interweaving of various temporalities. Thus, to consider the value of a construction as immutable and permanent, not understanding the patrimonial asset as it presents itself today, is to withdraw all its meaning.