URBAN SEDIMENTATION AND BUILDING MUTATION. The role of the pre-existing buildings in the transformation of the city

Abstract

This research focuses on the potential value of pre-existing buildings in Portuguese urban regeneration over the last twenty years. For this purpose, three buildings have been selected that have been given a new lease of life through a change of use and have made a significant contribution to the transformation of the city: an old market has been converted into a music school, with a pedestrian walkway and garden, a slaughterhouse restored as a cultural centre with a new square for the city, and the rehabilitation of a set of blocks in which the interior spaces are opened up to generate new paths. The methodology includes the analysis of the type and form of the urban elements - street, square, block - observing the transformations over time on the building and the open space. The result is a critical sample of urban fragments in which the project of mutation of the buildings has served to generate new public spaces.

Keywords: morphology, typology, morphogenesis, re-used buildings, public space