Bucharest Architecture Center

Authors’ Comment

The proposal addresses the site of the Bucharest City Hall block, a fragmentary insular form along the Dâmbovița River. This area demands a redefinition of its perimeter, particularly on the riverside, to achieve closure and spatial cohesion. Morphologically, the site reflects an insular urban typology reminiscent of Haussmannian Paris. The current configuration of the "island" emerged following the regularization of the Dâmbovița banks in the 1880s, although the Mihai Vodă Firefighters’ Barracks was already present as early as 1871. In 1910, the completion of the Ministry of Public Works building provided a formal architectural edge toward Elisabeta Boulevard, yet the riverside boundary remained unresolved and morphologically unarticulated. In its current state, the site opens directly onto the river, maintaining the spatial character of an unbuilt void, a latent space with strong potential for transformation into public space. The proposed intervention seeks to capitalize on this potential by preserving the open core and reimagining it as an urban echo of the City Hall’s court of honor. This transformation affords the space a dual role: one of symbolic reverence and one of vibrant, accessible public use. This proposal puts forth a critical perspective on the contemporary closure of urban blocks and the potential recovery of historic urban fabric within Bucharest’s central ring. The project's design decisions are grounded in a morphological and typological study, taking into account the scale and functional characteristics of the site, as well as its broader relationship with the city, specifically, its role as a boulevard-bound urban island. Further analytical layers include the articulation of boundaries, the relationship with adjacent exterior and interior spaces, and the ways in which the island is punctured or fragmented, and the potential recovery of historic urban fabric within Bucharest’s central ring. The intervention introduces a subterranean urban slab, conceived as a lower stratum housing a museum, research spaces, and archives, all naturally illuminated through light wells. Above this, new built volumes redefine the island’s edge without fully enclosing it. At street level, a vegetated platform is elevated to 2.4 meters, functioning as a continuous public space — symbolically raised above the urban ground. This green "tray" becomes the new visible and traversable heart of the Haussmannian island, opening up existing buildings toward it and inverting the conventional logic of the hidden inner courtyard.Through this proposal, the island is no longer conceived as a self-contained and isolated built object. Instead, it is reimagined as an open spatial matrix — one that establishes dynamic relationships between old and new, between underground and ground level, between edge and core. The project thus responds critically to the island’s progressive fragmentation, not by reconstructing a historical form, but by reinterpreting it: transforming the absence of void into a spatial presence, and relegating constructed mass to a lower, recessive position — rendering presence into absence.