The old and the new in monumental interventions: the Brazilian experience (1980-2010)

Abstract

This article reflects upon the recent dialogue between old and new, permanence and innovation, preservation and change. Aspects that are a part of the contemporary architectural production scenery, where, at increasingly fast pace, old buildings have become part of a new history of the city. Known as restoration, rehabilitation, readjustment, revitalization, recycling, intervention actions always interfere with time: the monument’s lifetime, the time during which it was submitted to degradation, the successive layers of time added to it along its transformations and the time it has left as a living monument. To clarify these and other issues on the matter, it is important to investigate the theoretical assumptions and project criteria used by the interventions on buildings of historical and artistic value – where, from my point of view, lies the core of this matter. Our starting point is the Italian school of restoring, specifically the principles of the Venice Charter, to better understand the features and procedures in pre-existing historical interventions in Brazil in the last decades. We have established eight different trends of the most recurrent interventions in a set of analyzed works. The groups formed share features, but we did not use strict criteria, instead they are used to enable the understanding of said works and characterize the range of restoring interventions in Brazil.