Arcaicó Way to Love: proposal of good practices for the historic houses of Caicó
Cultural heritage; Heritage intervention; Non monumental architecture.
Caicó is a city in the interior of Rio Grande do Norte that arouses affection from the majority of the people who were born or have lived there. However, it has been observed over the last decades an increase in the degradation of its houses from previous times (modernists and premodernists) that are concrete traces of the creation and the development of the city and the region of Seridó, in which it is inserted. Far from what is understood as “historical cities” in the Brazilian context, the architectural heritage of Caicó best fits what we chose to call non-monumental. The work problematizes the difficulty of understanding that this type of construction is a cultural heritage, which is largely due to the problem of valuing monumentality in Brazilian heritage history. However, considering that this lack of understanding is also the result of a lack of information. The research is based on the assumption that the more we understand about heritage, the more its value is perceived and protected. In this sense, the work aims, at the end, to build a booklet that points out good practices for the historical buildings of Caicó, studying the modifications undergone in this collection and how the theories of heritage interventions can be adapted to this scale.