Revitalizing the Drăgășani wine and vine research center

Authors’ Comment

The subject of redundant agro-industrial heritage and its contribution to the degradation of the mono-industrial city is insufficiently debated, becoming, in the last three decades, a real concern regarding the future of declining cities. Through this approach, the project exposes a possible attitude in terms of understanding the revitalization of the core of the Romanian (agro)industrial city.
The history of the development of agricultural exploitations in Romania emphasizes the capacity of the infrastructure of this mechanism to adapt or restructure, and the built heritage of the former regime played a supporting role in this process. The revitalization of this ruined built stock represents a necessary tool in the regeneration process of small agro-industrial towns.
The recovery processes of the productive areas are the sustainable development (through the recovery of the original functions and the involvement of new social and cultural uses) and the awareness of the economic and social potential. However, the transition of gaps between growing, stagnant and declining urban environments is often synchronized with the dynamics of the current social context.
The project provokes a direct and constant dialogue with one of the most important poles of development of Romanian agriculture (Academy of Agricultural Sciences Grigore Sisești - the entity that patronizes most of the Research Stations in the territory), and implicitly with specialists in the field of rehabilitation. Thus, although the stake of the diploma project is to recover a mechanism that did not fail but was forced to fail by the change of a regime and the appearance of private investments (implicitly institutionalized corruption), the instruments coming from external stimuli must be provided.
The aim of the intervention is the introduction, in the closed circuit of a research institution, of elements of a public nature, in order to metamorphose the production process into a museum.
The project concerns the three major components of SCDVV Dragășani, the production component - the Main Hall and the laboratories, the representation component - the Former Archive and the old building of the research center, and the residential component - the Municipal and Student Dormitories.
These three major components float in the garden of the Research Center, with important ampelographic collections, systematized so that it can become a tourist circuit in itself.