Decaying Cage: The São Pedro building in Fortaleza and patrimonial issues
Patrimony. São Pedro Building. Modernity. Memory. Praia de Iracema.
To keep standing, São Pedro Building has been following a long journey of abandonment and oblivion in the Ceará’s capital. Its worn walls are the exposed wounds of a society that has shredded its culture to fit the cycle of modernity, but has never harvested the fruits of authentic progress by guarding the facades too much and forsaking the pillars. This research longs for the paths, tracks, which brought the São Pedro Building to the state of decomposition it is in today, in order to understand apathy, which often turns into repulsion, to the patrimony in Ceará and disdain to the memory of City. It is an investigation of the pulsating relations between the conditions of the building and the patrimonial situation, understanding the symbol of the desire for modernity that it was in the past, its conflicting relation with the divergent economic and social interests that it awakens in the present and the forces it provokes in Praia de Iracema, neighborhood in which it is fixed. The methodological procedures integrate different ways of meeting and producing data, combining photographs of the building and its surroundings taken by me since 2015 that show the deterioration of the last years, a rescue of historical facts from Praia de Iracema itself at the time of the inauguration of what used to be Iracema Plaza Hotel through academic publications, journalistic materials and documentaries, besides proposing a field research based on the cartographic approach that estimates the knowledge found in the course, thus admitting that only the presence in the field, will make me experience and understand as deeply as possible the situation faced by the building and its people.