La fábrica tejida: Estrategias para rehabilitar del patrimonio industrial

Abstract

This paper proposes new registers for experimentation in industrial buildings' restoration, enabling different parameters to redefine the conditions in which building conservation is dealing with its purpose. After the World's financial crisis happened in 2007 architecture field started to remark the urgent need of enhancing the value of existing built environment. Many factories that had been abandoned during the last quarter of XXth Century were postulated as proper containers for new uses. Many approaches to restore industrial buildings end up with the generation of containers for uses that are completely apart from the previous building in all senses, creating thus a non-motivated coexistence. The study takes as starting point the recent past reflections on this ground, paying special attention of Jorge Otero-Pailos work, and looks at some contemporary works to rethink about the following features: 1.- Temporality, and inside it, obsolescence, comparing the durability of the proposed actions and the activ­ities to be sheltered by the building. 2.- Art-project interaction: how fiction literature and sculpture among other disciplines can provide with decisive information for the project. 3.- The coexistence in conservation of the new proposals with the old preexistent materia, the treatment of the last one as a main layer to be present in the proposal, and the implications of this fact. Design experiences based in the tales of inhabitants of the nearby of an old factory placed in Lleida, Spain, are carried out to integrate in the restoration process sensorial features and specific materiality related to the emotional and physical context. The results reveal an unusual materiality: the preexistent building, but the birth of a prosthesis which in a symbiotic manner helps it to go on and keep telling its raison d'être, whilst a new activity is happening inside, this last to be changeable and evolutive.