Urbanismo modernizador, consolidação modernista, reuso pós-moderno: a dinâmica de transformação urbana em Natal e a dilapidação de seu acervo arquitetônico

Modernising urbanism, modernist consolidation, post-modern re-use: the dynamics of urban transformation in Natal and the extinction of its architectural heritage As cities are constructed and re-constructed, building uses and styles are continually juxtaposed and counterposed as a result of social and environmental forces that are intrinsic to the urban dynamics. Based on this premise, this paper analyses the urban transformation of a central area deemed as “noble” in Natal, now part of the neighbourhoods of Tirol and Petropolis, the once denominated “Cidade Nova”, which was developed between 1901 and 1904 as an upper class residential suburb. Conceived in the so-called Master Plan, by Antonio Polidrelli and ratified in the Plano Geral de Systematização by Giacomo Palumbo, the originally designed 48 blocks (Miranda, 1999) were gradually occupied between the 1920s and 1960s, as can be verified in the 1924 plan, by Henrique Novaes and Paulo Coriolano for the firm Saturnino de Brito, commissioned to develop Natal’s water and sewage systems (Miranda,1981:123), which shows a few scattered constructions surrounding some small clusters of buildings. This process is also evidenced by the presence of morphological attributes dating from those decades in the architectural remains that have survived until the last decades of the 20th century. It is, therefore, this area, little larger than one and a half square kilometres, that concentrates the most important ensemble – in quantity and diversity – of proto- modern and modern domestic architecture produced in Rio Grande do Norte. The urban expansion of Natal in the 1970s and1980s, the shifting of its active centre from the original nuclei – Cidade Alta and Ribeira – to other parts of town, and the devaluation or emptying of those nuclei which followed that process, brought profound changes to the former site of Cidade Nova, which ceased to be a predominantly residential neighbourhood composed of one-family low-rise dwellings to become an upmarket commercial and service centre – i.e. the largest concentration of medical services – interspersed by high rise apartment blocks. Such changes in land use are promoting a rapid re-construction of Petrópolis and Tirol’s built environment so that all vestiges of the town’s best examples of modernist domestic heritage are threatened of extinction. The proposed paper depicts this process with examples of cases recorded and analyzed by the authors’ research group and seeks to demonstrate that in the absence of any official policy for safeguarding local modernism, in the context of a society predominantly made up of newcomers strongly motivated by the idea that renovation equals improvement (Natal’s population jumped from 200 thousand inhabitants in the 1960s to over a million in the present metropolitan area) and of an expanding land market, the “new” and the “lucrative” appear as the only notions underlying the current urban transformation. In this study, we also seek to demonstrate through the examined cases, that the lack of interest and respect for the integrity of the original formal and stylistic attributes of revamped or substituted modernist buildings, often resulting from poor theoretical and technical expertise among professionals who sees them as obsolete, is depriving Petropolis and Tirol of the environmental quality and ethos of the once highly praised Cidade Nova.