Cartagena: Transparency as a Strategy. World Architecture / Shijie Jianzhu 2020

Ruiz Bazán, Irene

2020

Ruiz Bazán, Irene. 2020. “Cartagena: Transparency as a Strategy.” World Architecture/Shijie Jianzhu 2020 (6): 106-109
ISSN 1002-4832

During the first decades of the 2000s the city has been transformed through different actions that have been based on the recovery and enhancement of its historical past through interventions of different nature. […] A tour of the streets of Cartagena shows how the city is still making great efforts to improve the quality of the residential architecture of the city, whose main architectural challenge is to reconcile its very different architectures, from the roman times, passing through baroque to contemporary architectures, in a context of active urban regeneration, in which most of the performances in the historic center of the city are falling into the dreaded “façadism”.
The projects we are analyzing have tried to give an answer to this challenge that goes beyond the mere formal conservation. The vision of all of them together allows to delineate how the transparency, both literal and phenomenological […] allows to use the historical memory of Cartagena’s past to propose new ways of understanding its complexity.