Grădina Luterană: Dwelling and Workspaces for Creative Industries

Authors’ Comment

In the heart of interwar Paris, on the top floor of a building on the Champs-Élysées, Le Corbusier designed, for the avant-garde aristocrat Carlos de Beistegui, a terrace imagined as a roofless room—a space defined by edges, oriented towards the sky, where the city becomes part of a carefully staged composition. More than a hanging garden, the terrace proposed a different way of looking at the city: fragmented, mediated, internalized.
High walls delineate clear boundaries, not to confine the gaze, but to guide it. Through mirrors, periscopes, and precise openings, Le Corbusier transforms the terrace into a scenography of perception. Paris reveals itself through selected details, reflections, and mental constructions. Thus, the terrace becomes both an optical and symbolic device—a space in which the city is contemplated as a composed image, in and through architecture.
That terrace imagined by Le Corbusier has become, for me, an inner landmark, a line of thought that has accompanied my exploration of the city. Just as that suspended space orders the gaze and refines perception, the hidden gardens of Bucharest open up another dimension of the urban realm—one that is subtle, affective, marked by silence and intimacy.
The hidden garden can be understood as an intermediate space, with porous edges and filtered access, where vegetation becomes a support for everyday experiences, discreet memories, and a sense of urban belonging. This garden does not express itself through monumentality or an explicit function, but through a calm presence, a slow rhythm, and the capacity to sustain a subtle relationship between people and the city.
In its structure, the hidden garden is built at the intersection of multiple dimensions: historical, social, perceptual. Within it are found traces of domestic neighborhoods, reinterpreted aristocratic fragments, modern forms of parks, and contemporary initiatives with a cultural character. Each of these layers contributes to defining a sensitive image, one that does not follow rigid grids but is shaped by gestures of activation, maintenance, and closeness.
Grădina Luterană finds its place deep within a plot on Luterană Street, in a Bucharest marked by historical layers, visible ruptures, and quiet proximities. In this dense and fragmented context, the garden becomes the binder, the invisible structure that connects dwelling to the city, and time to memory.
The intervention proposes a mixed-use ensemble—housing and workspaces for the creative industries—built around gardens that appear in successive sequences, with different intensities and degrees of openness. From the green spaces that discreetly extend towards the street, marking a calm presence in the irregular rhythm of the facades, to the garden sheltered in the depth of the plot, within permeable boundaries, vegetation organizes the space, tempers it, and humanizes it.
The central garden, withdrawn from direct view, becomes the emotional core of the project. Here, daily rhythms transform—living, working, and meeting unfold in an open yet protected space, shaped by the presence of plants, the interplay of shadows, and the natural closeness between people. This garden condenses all the themes of the research: belonging, retreat, the intermediate space, the quiet continuity of an urban memory.
The hidden garden offers a key to reading the contemporary city. In its silent layers accumulate slow rhythms, domestic gestures, traces of dwelling, and forms of belonging that are difficult to capture through plans or regulations. Vegetation, secluded paths, and permeable edges outline a sensitive urbanity, built from closeness and memory.