Re-building untold histories to preserve historical fragments along the street Rua do Benformoso in Lisbon

Abstract

Unbalanced tourist flows combined with aggressive lending and real estate markets can threaten the preservation of the built heritage, its sensitive and adaptive reuse. The sustainable management of endangered (or underrepresented) buildings is particularly critical in overcrowded historic centres, such as Lisbon. This research focuses on the spatial configuration of the street Rua do Benformoso in a traditional parish of Lisbon, where the building blocks remained unscathed after the 1755 earthquake. In revealing permanence, dissonance, and change of individual plots (or part of plots), this study draws attention on one of those physical features that characterized this street, the overhanging timber-frame constructions. The importance of interpreting the changes of the street-blocks by combing different records and bringing urban morphology, history, architecture and engineering is emphasized. In future studies, distinct morphological periods can be analysed considering map-based information and archival photos. Keeping alive irreplaceable physical legacies (or historical fragments) can contribute to sustainable heritage management of popular tourist cities, like Lisbon. Although this graspable memory is partial, it can represent a vehicle for a closer relationship to the past and for connecting urban morphology to heritage conservation practice.