The preservation of built heritage is a complex endeavor that recognizes the multiple lives cities and buildings lead over time. The article explores how past neglect has led to a destruction of collective memory, prompting a need for thoughtful restoration processes. Casa Castelar is presented as a case study, where a contemporary approach blends preservation with modern design, moving beyond strict dogmatic views on heritage. By strategically removing unnecessary additions, the original layout from 1890 is revived while maintaining visual connections, exemplifying a balance between memory and innovation in urban architecture.
To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to reinstate it in a finished state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.
Casa Castelar is an ideological and aesthetic exercise on how to incorporate the memory and entropy of the already existing - taking advantage of thermodynamic and informational capital - into a contemporary project.
In the knowledge that the site's heritage value lay beyond neo-Mudejar bonds and the distinctive lookout in front, we opted to recover the building's original scheme.
Thanks to a series of strategic operations and demolitions, which eliminated additions that had crowded the plot, the 1890 layout of an L around a courtyard reappeared.
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