HISTORICAL CENTER AND CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE: A THEORETICAL APPROACH FOR THE XXI CENTURY

Abstract

Contemporary architecture in historic centres and heritage contexts, and its ongoing process of development over the centuries, nowadays reveal the evolution of thought, social and cultural transformations, and historic events of different territories and their communities. Certainly, these processes have left physical and spatial marks imprinted in the urban environment in the form of urban morphologies and architecture languages, which are traceable through readings of different historic periods. This approach permits to identify, characterize and value continuous, evolutionary and current architectural productions.
Nowadays, contemporary architecture in historic districts faces relevant challenges and entails important responsibilities: the evolutionary process of heritage conservation, contextualization of new spatial developments, articulation and / or differentiation of new and ancient architectural styles, social participation and heritage appropriation among others, as alternative strategies to classic approaches that treat restoration of patrimonial buildings and heritage contexts as isolated elements.
Consequently, the following article attempts to inquire about concepts extracted from contemporary architecture and historic centres with the aim of generating debate. However, this theoretical framework does not intend to define specific parameters for the insertion of contemporary architecture in historic districts.