URBAN SPACES 5 – SFINȚII VOIEVOZI HOUSING

an attempt to recover some of the either restrained or whimsical elegance of Bucharest’s architecture

URBAN SPACES 5. Sfinții Voievozi Housing

Winner of Annual of Architecture Award of the ”Built architecture/ the architecture of collective housing” section, 2022

Nominated for the Collective Housing section at the Architecture Biennale, Bucharest, 2023

Winner of Beta Awards of the ”Built Space/ Residential/ L” section, 2024

Winner of Share Architecture Awards of the ”Multi-unit Residential” section, 2024

Bucharest, Romania

Client:
Urban Spaces
Project Duration:
2015-2022
Gross area:
9.645 m²

Like many other places in Bucharest, here too arises the need to somehow piece together mixed bits and pieces from the neighborhood, which overlapped throughout time.

This need is accompanied by an attempt to recover some of the either restrained or whimsical
elegance of Bucharest’s architecture where means such as the play on surfaces, textures, nuances of finishes, depth of folds or the emphasis of edges and creases were used in its creation. The
overlapping enclosures as well as the mixture of materials and nuances could also be regarded as a different type of fragmentation.

The ground floor is taller and stays open to the street, which is not necessarily typical for this side of town or for Bucharest itself. That which can be referred to as typical, however, is the random encounter, on a street corner, crossroad, alley or in the courtyard of a more upscale house, of a shop or a small neighborhood bar. It is in this type of unordered, small scale, neighborhood that we imagine our
opening towards the street, for the courtyard and the buildings on Sfintii Voievozi Street 20-24, to fit in.