Reapproaching old buildings within the city

Abstract

Suddenly for some reason I thought of Brasilia. The city of Brasilia was inaugurated in 1960. It was a perfect multidisciplinary exercise of harmonization between the urban planner (Lúcio Costa), the architect Óscar Niemeyer), and the landscape artist-architect (Roberto Burle Marx). Moreover, Brasilia was a typical construction of a city by the conquest of the open space made of sheer optimism, the triumph of talent over doubt and of the audacity over pessimism (Gorelik, 2005). This reference to Brasilia serves as a sort of epigraph with which I will unravel some of my loose topics about the role of old buildings in reapproaching the contemporary city. I have never addressed specifically a journal for architects, city planners, or urban designers. On the contrary, I am far more used to deal with urban issues for groups of social scientists, sociologists, like myself, historians, anthropologists, geographers, and so forth. Here I am anyway, trying to address the issue of buildings and their possible reuses upon an interdisciplinary view, counting on your benevolence.