The building is located on a dead end street in the northwestern part of the old city center. The distinctive urban fabric, with various shapes of plots, heigths and stylesis suffers a strong speculative pressure, and most of the recent buildings are highly dissonant in scale and image.
Text: Ștefan Ghenciulescu
Project: ADN BA
Photo: Cosmin Dragomir
[update] A film by Andrei Mărgulescu: “I love that, somehow, this new building in central Bucharest’s tissue and the inflection of the street with all that it implies make up a small world together.”
The plot is an irregular concave polygon, with a single small blind wall. Like its predecessors—the fairly large interwar modernist apartment buildings that squeezed in between villas and 19th century houses—this newest operation achieves higher density, while adapting to the fabric and keeping the historic scale and openness of the area.
The concave corner of the street and several recesses define a sort of an open fan made of successive levels that come closer or further to and from the neighbors and the alignment.
The stairs, access corridors, hallways, and corner loggias absorb or at least soften the irregularities of the plot. This way, the main rooms get at least two right angles.
On the last floors, the roof gardens become wonderful places, intertwined with the free‑plan interior. Together they shape a space with fragile limits, floating above the old town.
The withdrawals, advancements, pergolas, cutouts, portions where the structure divides the facade, define a kind of garment composed of several intermediate spaces between the apartments and the neighboring houses or the street: a complex relationship created with simple means.
There’s a gentle newcomer in the neighborhood.
ARCHITECTURE: ADN BA — Adrian Untaru, Andrei Şerbescu, Bogdan Brădăţeanu, Valentina Ţigâră, Carmen Petrea, Pavel Albu
STRUCTURE: Popp si Asociaţii
INSTALLATIONS: Maestro Proiect Design
DELIVERY: 2015
PARTNERS:
Edil Construct 2004: exterior facade finishes, interior plasterboard partitions, interior mechanical screed and plaster
Caparol: Interior finishes: Akkordspachtel acrylic plaster; Interior paint scheme: Weissgrund primer + Capamaxx paint ; 442 Disbopox GaragenSiegel epoxy
Vogel&Noot: appliances
