The revitalization of the former Tram Depot in Timișoara. SCENE+ Arts Center

Authors’ Comment

Cities rarely vanish through demolition; they evolve through continuous overwriting. The former Tram Depot in Timișoara exemplifies this condition: an industrial territory which, having lost its productive function, retains in its halls, structures and traces a stratified record of urban history. Here, memory operates not as relic, but as design instrument.
SCENE+ is neither a restoration nor a substitution of the existing fabric with a contemporary image. It situates itself within the tension between permanence and transformation, reading the site as a palimpsest of three concurrent conditions: the archetypes latent in the memory of the place, the surviving industrial bodies as material evidence, and the future interventions that introduce new modes of occupation. No hierarchy is imposed; the layers coexist, overlap and contradict one another.
The halls are retained as large, flexible spatial frameworks, activated by a sequence of precise insertions that deliberately refuse formal continuity with the historic structures. Conceived as autonomous, almost foreign objects, they expose the distance between historical layers through geometry, materiality and scale, making transformation legible and contrast a compositional principle. Old and new coexist not through reconciliation, but through sustained negotiation.
The former industrial ground is reorganised as a largo park: a continuous field of movement, occupation and encounter that reconnects the depot to the city and to the landscape of the Bega corridor. Open space ceases to be residual, becoming the infrastructure that binds fragments of differing histories and degrees of permanence.
A contemporary arts programme (exhibitions, performance, education, gastronomy, coworking, public gathering) inhabits the halls without erasing their productive memory, substituting cultural flows for industrial ones. The architecture remains intentionally incomplete: the existing structure provides the framework, while successive occupations redefine its meaning over time.
SCENE+ thus proposes more than adaptive reuse. It examines architecture's capacity to act simultaneously upon time, memory and the city, converting the friction between historical layers into a principle of spatial organisation. The contradiction between what remains and what is introduced is not resolved, but made productive. The depot is understood not as a completed historical object, but as a field of possibilities in which heritage becomes the infrastructure of new public life.