FIGURE AND BACKGROUND. ARCHITECTURE AND PUBLIC SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY MONTEVIDED

This study of Monlevideos public spaces integrales the research "Conceptual mapping of Uruguayan architecture, 1985-2005", currently being developed at the Institute of History of Architecture UdeinR-Faiq. Its objective is to elucidate the underying conceptual foundations of recent architectural practice. The hypothesis proposes that the post-dictatorship context, prone to retreve a tractured past, and the future prospects opened by the paradigm crisis, produce the conceptual pair memory innovation that linges culture and architecture. Simultaneously a local architecture with its long-lasting concepts continues to exist, indifferent to this polarity. These three attitudes are traced in interventions in public spaces as representations of culture and its historicity. The study venties practies trat fit with prefigured ones, distinguishing different relationships between architacture and public space, understood an teractions between figure and background. TheseFlucluate between the seemic aspect existentiel space and gravitation around icons.