Urban Landscapes of Industry: Aesthetic Appropriations and Heritage Conservation

Abstract

In recent decades, the definition of industrial urban landscape presents an ambiguous and controversial reality when it comes to defining heritage processes of industrial buildings and structures associated with the productive sector that historically have shaped certain areas of the contemporary city. From the nineteenth century on, the structures of industry and those related to public works were the aim of debates about their integration into the reality of the city, the landscape and the architecture of their time, finally being orchestrated as linguistic and conceptual models of the modern architecture, converted first into mythical icons of functional style of Modern Movement and later in real worthy of historic preservation. The aim of this paper is to analyze, through various sources and examples, the mutable in time and space perceptions and assessments that have experienced heritage and industrial landscapes along the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appropriations reflected in aesthetic, urban and heritage fields.