Bucharest, Romania

REHABILITATION_VL 173

Jean Craiu, Alexandra Demetriu

Alexandru Gheorghe (Poteca Studio)

800 sqm

The story of the house on Vasile Lascar St. is the story of a many modernist houses from Bucharest: it has undergone numerous changes in ownership, usage and general configuration between 1946 when it was built and 2014 when we were appointed to revitalize it.

The Project
Our proposal aims at recovering the original internal space quality through the insertion of a bespoke infrastructure perfectly adapted to the client’s brief. We embarked on the project as you would an archaeological survey: on dismantling the improvised interventions of the former occupants we discovered the generosity of the original space, designed in the 1940s. The strict budget limitations prompted us to be resourceful in the use of a restrained materials palette, organised in simple geometries only: metallic mesh and reinforced glass screens, green living walls, folded metal sheets.

The project is designed as a series of spatial interventions that revitalise the neglected building and re-introduce it to the public. The site limit on Vasile Lascar St. takes on ambiguous features: urban bench, lush planter and services housing unit, mobile gate that defines a new public square pocket in front of the house when fully open.

The Restaurant
The drive of the project was to initiate an elastic dialogue with the old house, inviting the fleeting manifestations of urban life, changing in accordance to these, and then re-morphing by design.

Text provided by the architects