Remodelling And Recasting. Two Works In The Urban Renewal Process Of A Historical Centre: Alcoy 1988-2000.
This paper presents two project experiences in the city of Alcoy that may somehow serve as a sample of the varied number of plans aimed in Spanish cities at the improvement of historical centres. During the 1980s the impact of morpho-typological experiences into the Spanish urban professional culture, mainly sourced from Italian studies, marked the search for new project control of planning interventions, recognizing the notion of urban transformation as a complex process. Founded in those principles, and profiting an early coordination among intervening public agencies, Alcoy municipality set up a planning initiative that evolved towards a global urban programme later called ARA Plan, in which the two projects presented here were the only significant, effectively built-up elements. Barbacana housing project addressed the configuration of a new urban space within the limits of the enclosure of the old 14th century wall (hence its barbican name), proposing an urban complex intimately integrated into the structure of the city. La Sang quarter, for its part, represents a larger example of project aimed at redesigning a largely dilapidated, vacant urban area. The project is developed on the traces of remaining ruins, with the addition of green spaces. More than two decades after completing these two works, recent theoretical Italian contributions allow for a renewed interpretation of the thinking and resources employed in designing and building them. Each project takes on previous architectural experience through a process of critical recognition, in which positive aspects of form are updated and given a renewed formal interpretation, either by remodelling, through considered reuse of pre-existing elements, or by fully recasting, reinventing a new built landscape.
Keywords: Alcoy, Spanish urban regeneration, Morpho-typological approach, Project analysis.
