Spatial Connections and Functional Conversion of Customs Warehouse, Bucharest

Authors’ Comment

Industrial sites were once the core around which communities developed. Taking into consideration the historical past that emphasizes the way of Bucharest to developed, adapted or reconstruct and the industrial heritage as a support in this process, I consider that the reintegration of this fund in the urban tissue is imperative. As an argument we can rely on the need for a sustainable development by using the constructive characteristics that can be easily adapted to current needs, by their functional and conformin nature for evolution; but, above all, the need of awareness and recognition of a fund that, paradoxically, was once an engine of urbanization.
The study had a double purpose: to understand the potential of a particular situation regarding the position of the industrial heritage in a central area, and to understand the ways in which it can become a factor of an urban regeneration.
In this situation, I have considered important to understand the way different scales are related- from the city scale (understanding the historical context in relation to the present), to the neighborhood scale (the relation of industrial sites with the community, the analysis of the Filaret-Rahova industrial archipelago and the way it can be connected), to the scale of the site (the diploma project as a first coordinate within the proposed route).
From the seven industrial sites of the Filaret-Rahova area, I have choosed that the diploma project should focus on the former Warehouse Customs complex, implementing the intervention principles resulted from the study. The way it develops is based on 4 major principles, namely:
-continuing the compositional logic by completing the symmetry and developing along existing axes;
-morphological conformation taking into consideration the route of the former train rails;
-functional connections of the refunctionalized and proposed constructions given back to the community through the social dimension of the hub;
-generating courtyards through the existing directions as mediation points between old and new, heterogeneous neighborhoods and, at the same time, as points of perception of buildings as artifacts in an urban museum.
The intervention on this site involved the expansion of one of the central warehouses, the insertion of new volumes that support the existing composition and have a contribution in the conformation of the public squares as pulsating, populated open spaces through which the site can be crossed as a route in which the cultural dimension of the industrial heritage is emphasized.