Dilemmas of architectural public life

Abstract

Speaking about a public dimension of architecture implies leading architecture to the scale of the city, in this dimension social processes are linked to the creative strategies of the project. These social processes have been restructured in relation to the period in which many paradigms of urban planning and architecture project resources were constructed. Currently, the conceptual shifts from public space to landscape, from planning based on formal to processual rationality, and from networks to circulation as a hegemonic function, describe the reconfiguration of practices and modalities in which architecture is situated in the public sphere.
This paper analyses how these displacements affect the urban spaces architecture. How some practices of architecture interact with this context and tends to the reformulation in the collective experience. It is about recognizing the conditions in which the architectural work is inscribed in the design of the links between people, their activities and the spaces they inhabit. A practice that has sometimes been forgotten in contemporary metropolitan life, but still keeps all its creative potential, the one that characterizes the links and social realizations that need space for their deployment.