¿Congelar el pasado o construir desde la historia?

Abstract

Retain the past or construct from history? The restoration of historic city centres still causes great polemic among architects, historians and the general public in our day.Determining the limits of our performance and even justifying our intervention on the architectural legacy of our forbears tends to pose problems that have not yet been settled in a satisfactory way. Whether we should conserve historic centres as we find them or, on the contrary, we should act upon them with present day architectural methods constitute the two extreme positions that can be confronted to each other. The fundamental issue is to decide how much we owe our past and where we should set the limits of our rights and duties to the city.Venecia. Al fondo, la plaza de san Marcos, estructurada según actuaciones sucesivas a lo largo del tiempo