The role of cultural value in sustainable heritage reuse - the intervention on Teátro Thalía in Lisbon

Abstract

Currently, reusing built heritage rather than constructing new buildings represents a significant step forward in reducing excessive resource consumption. Therefore, these architectural interventions in the city can counteract such phenomena by avoiding large-scale demolition and supporting more thoughtful urban planning. In this vein, Portuguese architecture has understood heritage intervention as a means of contextualising history and vernacular influences in favour of contemporary and recognised architecture. It is crucial to verify whether cultural assessment plays a sufficiently relevant role in these procedures within this process of architectural renovation. For this reason, the intervention on the Teátro Thalía in Lisbon (2012) by Gonçalo Byrne and Barbas+Lopes is critically examined from a values-based approach in order to answer the question of whether cultural assessment has been a key factor in determining design strategies.. This dialogue between the heritage project and the design process takes place in a cyclical process that begins with the application of four actions: framing, documenting, acting and contrasting. Transversal to the application of these actions is the action of assessing, which takes on a central role in the methodology. When applied to the case study, this process demonstrates how cultural valuation acts as a guarantor of the quality of the intervention, since the study of the attributes of the property and the values it embodies is a source of information that ensures the preservation of the property's  identity.