The State as Protagonist: Reconversion of Industrial Buildings in Santa Fe (Four Cases)

Abstract

Given the changes in the productive and economic systems of the last decades of the 20th century, much industrial architecture became obsolete, with a progressive abandonment. In recent years in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina, there were interventions from the municipality and the provincial government revealing the importance of actions that, while recovering architectures of this type, make valuable contributions to the construction of citizenship and urban life.

This article is presented as a reflection derived from a research project, which interrogates the architectures produced through state management and addresses the problem from the methods of the history of architecture as well as from the critical interpretation of the collected data.

The main objective of the analysis of these four cases is to consider the positive impact of this type of intervention, intended for the recovery of deactivated industrial buildings through political actions, to turn them over to public use, with the intention to offer an improvement in the present and, at the same time, to guide society towards building a better future.