“To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to reinstate it in a finished state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.” Eugène Viollet le-Duc. Building on the Built Cities and buildings have many lives. For decades a lack of feeling for the remains of the past, the incapacity to see them as depositories of collective memory, has contributed to the destruction of our built heritage. The erosion of our built history has led to a pendular reaction and the sacralization of heritage, the freezing of the object in time, sometimes without the rigor that such a crystallization would deserve. Casa Castelar is an ideological and aesthetic exercise on how to incorporate the memory and entropy of the already existing – taking advantage of thermodynamic and informational capital – into a contemporary project, from an angle having little to do with dogmatic preservation.
