In between. Intermediate housing on Vaselor street, Bucharest. Vaselor Home Gardens

Authors’ Comment

The old Bucharest dwelling is still present at city level and offers playful and picturesque spaces that remind of the character of the garden city or of the old typologies of dwelling applicable even today. The architecture of these types of housing is presented today as a space of contrasts, which once traversed, transposes you into different historical periods, of glory or failure of the development of the city. The legacy is still present but hidden behind indifference. Its remembrance has led to searches in terms of housing, searches that do not destroy, do not eclipse, do not damage but integrate, flatter and solve a number of problems that the city faces in terms of housing.
The main research question was ”How can the typology of home living with the garden be taken into account in the context of the need to densify the city?”
The site is located in Bucharest, near Obor Square, in a tissue of old houses but which is not part of the protected area. Historically, the area has developed from one with large plots of land intended for housing and arable gardens to one with narrow plots of land intended for housing until the communist period, when it begins to be destroyed by the presence on the site of the Vinegar Factory. The factory lasted until 1996 when it’s doors closed and then began a long process of degrading until today when the site is empty. With the advent of communism also came the closure of this area behind the high blocks on the boulevard. There is a rupture between the 2 typologies to which the intervention on the site must respond: fabric with vernacular architecture and the monotonous “back of the block”.
The project proposes a recovery of the island's identity and filling the gap in the site with a typology of housing specific to the area, namely “living in a common yard”. This typology converted to an intermediate habitat of individual and collective dwelling but to preserve the identity of the typologies of dwelling encountered in the area such as the mews, the dwelling in the mirror, the common yard; both single-family homes and apartment buildings.Individual overlapping dwellings, configured as duplexes, are positioned around the perimeter of the site and have private entrances and courtyards. The construction in the middle of the site is a type of collective housing with a height regime on the ground floor and two floors and the third floor withdrawn. Private courtyards and terraces are external spaces available to each home and the common courtyard, which also functions as a space for pedestrian circulation, is intended for tenants.
The challenge was in determining the delicate balance between Dwelling – Private (intimate, hidden), Common (together), Public (representation, city), between Use and Form, between Permanence and Temporary. The solution try to harmoniously combine these two types of urban fabric, proposing an intermediate housing, on a human scale and also to show the integrity of the architecture: discipline as a synthesis of its specific themes - orientation, space, light, structure, material, order, type.