Politehnica University of Bucharest extension - Education & Research Centre

Authors’ Comment

Today's image of the Bucharest fabric is the result of numerous patches and wear and tear along the temporal thread of its evolution. The unbuilt, like the built, actively participates in the urban landscape. The opportunity for this design theme came from the proximity to the Politehnica University of Bucharest - Campus Polizu and also from the desire expressed by its management through the competition announced a few years ago.Insertion into a fragmented and affected context over time made the first step of the project to propose a new image of the entire island. The principles that underpinned the project are: respecting the directions of the old plots, taking over volumes and directions generated by the context, restoring the continuous front on both streets, avoiding height accents that ignore the medium to low scale of the adjacent built environment and most importantly creating a central area - an interior courtyard that functions as a point of capture and redistribution of circulations.Within the project, we chose to locate the public functions at ground level, adding a pedestrian street that would connect the two streets to which the volume opens. At the same time, the new pedestrian area allows the generation of a square in direct connection with the main entrance. At the basement level and in direct connection with the buried courtyard, there are functions intended for students such as: reading rooms, individual study rooms and a cafeteria. The double or triple height spaces, the transition areas from the most intimate to the most public, the inner courtyard and the pedestrian passages that lead to it are elements that define the complexity of such a program.