Lister Extension

Authors’ Comment

Difficult project: a building located in the protected area of Cotroceni; a house with no special character, a mimicked modernism for a building used in real estate speculation. During the interwar period, the photographer Willy Pragher rented the ground floor.
Complicated issue: the real beneficiary of the project is only one of the 3 apartments that overlap in the building; the brief required the extension of the top level apartment so as to make use of a very low attic, hardly noticeable from the outside. Therefore, the construction had to take place without interrupting the residents on the lower levels.
Only a light construction system, such as a timber structure, could be used in order to decrease the load on the foundations. At the same time, the entire building had to be consolidated only from the outside, by reinforcing part of the masonry walls and discharging the resulting load to a new foundation beam.
The extension was designed with respect for the character of the protected area, but without becoming a simple pastiche of a long-gone period. Thus, the fibercement cladding differentiates the extension from the existing construction. The latter is finished with sprayed plaster, characteristic for the interwar period. The construction site was monitored in order to preserve the original details, without intervening or modifying anything in the inhabited apartments during the construction work.