Lost Bucharest Museum

Authors’ Comment

Architecture is perhaps the place that shows us both its 'spongy' character in that it absorbs time to absorb history and also its ephemeral character in that it is easy to lose, but not the memories and memories that can hang in one's consciousness until forgotten. The loss of home is the immediate disaster after the loss of a family member. In present times, things tend to fall very quickly into the past, to disappear, which shows that the balance between the present and the past is disturbed. The builders and builders of architecture do not seek eternity through this, but the postponement of decay - a postponement of entropy.
The memory generated by architecture comes from two sources: on the one hand that created by the architectural object itself, built to memorize a vital component of the society that assimilates it, and on the other hand that which the edifice gradually accumulates, absorbing the time it passes through. The place where the memory takes place becomes the link between all its stages. The sites represent a palimpsest, an arrangement of consecutive layers that have been uncovered by the consecutive erasure of lost states. Thus, in this case, the "forgetting" is fertile because the space becomes "con-looked" by the "presence of the past states through which that site will have passed". Our concern should focus on preserving, in the process, the time they contain.
The particular case of Bucharest, in relation to the memory of its places, shows us what can cause an urban event to happen without the (un)will of the society that developed that city. The influences of major factors such as the economic or political environment have proved that transformations could still be dictated and not understood as needs. A city steeped in history harbors its memory in places and spaces unsuitable for their accumulation and display, forcing continuous adaptations for the storage and display of memory materials.
The project started from the idea of building a center to commemorate the Lost Bucharest. A Bucharest that only reveals itself to us through the archival images that bear witness to the destruction. The project proposes a Museum dedicated to the Lost Bucharest together with a city archive house to house the municipal library and the city's archive collections. All the memory of the existing and lost city in one place. Being located directly opposite the site of the traumatic event, it has an almost completely open skyline to the mutilated area, now enclosed behind the curtain of blocks. The place where until 30 years ago the Archives Monastery on Mihai Voda Hill was located is now a mere park.
The project aims to evoke absence and thus implies detachment from the present in order to bring the past to light. The intention was to generate an esplanade that would stop behind the town hall, that would emphasize its facade facing the Dâmbovița and allow it to connect with the river. In order to make this esplanade happen, the project developed underground by building two levels to house archive collections and the museum, together with the lapidarium, whose components are part of the destroyed buildings. The excavated courtyard allows vegetation to be planted and access is via a staircase attached to it. The new building rises in the extension of the eastern wing of the town hall, and the completion of the square comes through the placement of a bridge to enclose the contours of the urban pocket and link the museum to its most important exhibit, the town itself.