Housing as Cultural Heritage

the houses of Vilanova Artigas listed in 2018

Abstract

The house, as typology and architectural object, has always been an important document for the history of architecture, present with more or less emphasis on the narratives of all periods - from prehistory to contemporaneity - encouraging architects to speculate forms, to work on programs and to test materials and techniques. With the extension of the references to preservation, according to the 1964 Venice Charter, residence was understood not only as an architectural document, but the way of inhabiting it became a privileged source for understanding society, its ways of living, whether in the field of aesthetics impelling new forms or as meaning revealing desires, strategies of domination and revolution. In addition to the traditional areas of knowledge: psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, geography, environment, architecture, urbanism, arts and engineering, more recently houses have been subsidizing research on domesticity and gender, finally, a cultural good that illustrates the alliance between the material and immaterial nature of heritage, which encourage studies not only in several areas but also promotes the transdisciplinarity. However, as a cultural good it is one of the typologies that presents the greatest difficulty of preservation, in all its stages: in recognition, documentation, conservation and appropriation, almost always involving much controversy in any of them. The preservation of Artigas’s seven residences listed as a cultural heritage by Conpresp in 2018 constitutes the great challenge to be faced that this work intends to examine.