Between Old and New: Urban Interventions in German City Centres

The collective memory of European cities is preserved not only in monuments and urban artefacts, but also in the minute structure of urban parcels and blocks, in the layout of streets, squares and natural elements. This memory, often canceled and partially removed during last century, survives beyond its material dimension, also through the representation of its image transmitted to us through iconographic documents. Through these documents we can imagine these spaces that have slowly built up over time as real lieux de mémoire. The rebirth of those places inside German historical centers is based on different levels: the morphological layout of urban spaces and blocks, the typological solution of each house, the urban image recreated, between philologic re-proposal and critical reinterpretation. The aim of regaining its lost historicity depends on the appropriateness of architectural and technical solutions adopted in each project, beyond too simplistic oppositions between terms like Old & New or Authentic & Fake. In this sense, such case-studies are not to be understood as nostalgic attempts to reproduce the city as it was, nor as artificial simulacra or hyperrealities, but as mature examples of critical reconstruction, according to the meaning introduced in the European debate since the 1970s.