Preservation and interventions in railway heritage, Spanish cases: from Madrid to Seville

• Grant number: 24/18696-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Aline Coelho Sanches
• Grantee: Eduardo Bacani Ribeiro
• Host Institution: Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo de São Carlos (IAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research aims to carry out a critical analysis, based on documents (graphic material, descriptive reports, newspaper articles, internal documents dealing with industrial/railway heritage, specific bibliography, etc.) and on-site records (images, oral accounts, etc.), of the interventions undergone by four Spanish railway stations between the 1990s and the 2010s; two of them are located in the city of Madrid (Atocha and Príncipe Pío) and two in Seville (San Bernardo and Sevilla-Plaza de Armas). These interventions are highly emblematic, as they caused irreparable damage to the internal dimensions of these buildings, to the detriment of the integral preservation of the facades, causing, for example, the removal of the tracks and the erasure of dimensions that characterize the memory of the work and the industrial nature of the property. In view of this, this analysis, which has never been published before, is not interested in evaluating this set of works in itself, but also in establishing a two-way dialectical path with cases from São Paulo and Europe that have already been recorded and studied by the researcher. This will allow parallels to be drawn between these different cases and, thus, highlight, from a South American perspective, the panorama in which the Spanish cases are inserted. In this way - based on isolated analyses of each of the four Spanish works, considerations made about this set of works and parallels drawn with international examples - the work will seek to compose a critical and enlightening corpus about interventions on railway heritage and may become important material for supporting new research and critically guiding interventionist practices around railway assets present in different locations. (AU)