Interface with Lake Morii: Collective Housing

Authors’ Comment

INTERFACE WITH LAKE MORII: COLLECTIVE HOUSING, Bucharest

The construction of the man-made reservoir Lake Morii in Bucharest, affected an area of approximately 240 hectares, demolished over 400 houses, two schools, the Church of Saint Nicholas the Hierarch (built in 1564), and the Crangasi Cemetery.

All of these in less than a year between 1985 and 1986.

Even so, the thrill of living cannot be stopped and the main aim of the project is to emphasize that, supporting housing development and improving the quality of life through public spaces.
*The project is assuming the actual poor condition of the area. Through its process, it took into consideration to become a social housing project, but in the end, it was to promote the potential of a future development.


The project site is located between the old urban fabric and the lake. The existing houses in this area are disconnected from the newly planned neighbourhood, lacking both infrastructure and public amenities.

The place I'm talking about is a leftover and at a masterplan scale, it is to be attached to the concrete ring promenade of the lake.

The project stitches the urban fabric back towards the lakeshore, creating ground-level points of interest and green transit areas, while considering the streets that once crossed the site but were abruptly cut off.

Following the traces of the former streets, the building is split by crevasses that guide movement and evoke the memory of those streets through a series of trees placed at the end of each visual axis. These trees become significant and create a specific atmosphere, as it is captured in the photographs made by the Italian Luigi Ghirri.

In this way, a linear garden emerges, mediating the relationship between the existing buildings and the building project. All the buildings there, the neighbours, have the rear facades towards the lake, their spatial orientation is towards the other street.

And one more thing, I mentioned about the way building is split, and to this, I considered the “splitting house” artwork by the artist and architect Gordon Matta-Clark as a reference for this project. Through that, the limit between the public and the private space is emphasised. I tried to deconstruct the limit between the project and the actual existing street, create a different access point, as a starting point for the whole built band I have. The building there becomes a screen and beyond it, there is the landscape.

The precise orientation in the north-south direction, facing the lake to the south, stimulated the design of double-sided apartments on the upper floors, featuring large terraces on both facades, conceived as open, blank canvases, awaiting to be filled with personal expressions of domestic life . . .