Gabroveni Cultural Center

Bucharest, Romania
International Competition 2009Restoration, expansion and functional remoulding of "Gabroveni Inn", historical center of Bucharest, Lipscani Street

Client: City of Bucharest
Gross area: 2.927 m²

Bucharest - a city of influences and confluences, a heterogeneous mixture, a perpetual transition. A swinging city between "Little Paris" and "The Gates of the East", whose name was just given in 1921 by "Capital Babylon" (Radu Cosmin, Babylon, 1921), seems strangely familiar today. Like Italo Calvino's Zaira, Bucharest is scratched, cut, hit - and, most likely, that's how it was always. It accumulates memories, shades and layers. And, as Ivan said Kucina in "The Art of Balkanization", fragmentation and apparent conflict provide "structures of organized uncertainty to those who need to lose themselves in chaos Balkan, to be able to find alternative nuances and meanings". The project
ours settles in such a reading of the centre furrowed by old traces and of Bucharest, which accumulates conflicts, grows in fragmentation and, through this, contains more and more past in the corners of its streets.

PROJECT TEAM:
Architects
Andrei Șerbescu
Adrian Untaru
Bogdan Brădățeanu
Irina Băncescu
Cristina Enuță