Re-imagining the Port Heritage of Rosario: From Grain Storage Silos to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario (Argentina)

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a shift in the approach, revaluation, and preservation of architectural heritage, emphasizing the importance of contemporary society’s reinterpretation of historical and identity components from a comprehensive perspective that enables new developments and reappropriations. In this context, a pictorial turn also takes place through which heritage no longer remains confined to fixed meanings. Instead, new images with a life of their own emerge, transitioning from traditional representation to presentation. Within this context, this article aims to investigate the images generated around Rosario’s port heritage, which began to transform with the reinvention of the river in the mid-1980s and continues in process today. It focuses on the study of grain storage silos, initially known as Davis, transformed in 2004 into the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rosario (MACRO). The research uses a transdisciplinary qualitative methodology combining urban-architectural heritage, cultural and visual studies. It is recognized that the diverse images generated in recent years around the architectural heritage of the silos have facilitated new and everyday appropriations by the city’s inhabitants, redefining it as a new urban icon. This process has sparked a reimagining of the city’s heritage, history, and memory with images that speak for themselves and generate new individual and collective meanings.