Weaving spaces together: The conversion of the “December 13th” Leather Goods Factory into a textile museum

Authors’ Comment

The diploma project began as a silent manifesto on forgotten heritage. Through a careful, almost methodical macro-scale observation of cities, the issue of industrial spaces emerges: a highly fragile historical and social context under constant pressure of being erased from collective memory and local identity. From this overarching perspective, the endeavor naturally anchors itself in a concrete spatial reality: the industrial morphology of the Lower Town in Sibiu. By inventorying the old halls in the historical center of Sibiu, I discovered a fascinating legacy: a textile craftsmanship network that once stretched across Cisnădie, Sibiu, and Tălmaciu.
Following this thread, the discourse focuses on the former "Covtex" factory. Today, this industrial colossus has dissolved into a forgotten textile heritage, relocated to the Textile Industry Museum in Cisnădie, alongside artifacts of the old guilds. Now, however, the memory of the place is blocked: closed due to accessibility standards and relocation impossibilities, the museum has turned this collection into a captive archive. A similar situation is found in Tălmaciu, where the spaces of the Românofir factory are being reappropriated by the community through a natural desire to host cultural activities.
The will to carry forward the textile heritage dictated a direct approach to the space's users. Dialogues with locals and artists revealed the inadequacy of a purely exhibition-based function. Therefore, the spatial response translates into a complex architectural program: a hybrid museum, capable of functioning as an independent, circular organism. Thus, spaces emerge to house the museum, the textile laboratory, the research center, the creative workshops, and the textile recycling center.
The Textile Museum proposes the conversion of the former "13 Decembrie" leather goods factory, located in the historical center of Sibiu. This center is divided into two urban levels: the Upper Town and the Lower Town, where the studied site is located. The character of this place has been anchored in production since the medieval period, thanks to the guilds that used the river's water as a resource. This functional separation generated a hierarchy still visible today: the Upper Town concentrates cultural and tourist activities, while the Lower Town has suffered continuous degradation, being predominantly occupied by decommissioned brownfield industrial sites.
The project's goal is to create a direct link between the two urban areas, a connection achieved precisely through the inserted cultural character. Thus, outlining this coherent cultural axis will also integrate the two medieval towers, survivors of the 1858 demolitions, into the tourist circuit. Historical memory is directly transposed into the design of this place: the footprint of the former defense wall, reconstructed from archives, is visibly marked on the ground. In the same spirit, the structural grid of the factory extends into the pavement of the inner courtyard, managing to visually weave the interior space with the exterior.
The stake of the project lies in dissolving the barrier between exhibition and production. The spatial route becomes immersive, allowing a direct look behind the "scenes" of textile processing, where machines operate in real time.
The logic of the intervention is based on outlining the inner courtyard, a gesture that reintegrates a typology deeply rooted in the historical character of the place. Furthermore, the project assimilates craftsmanship at the detail level, transforming the building itself into a woven fabric through the intertwining of the courtyard facade's structural elements and the shading system, like warp and weft threads. Each insertion acts as a sensitive filter, meant to dissolve the harsh impact of the industrial volumetry amidst a traditional urban fabric.
In essence, "Weaving spaces together" transcends metaphor. The project becomes a gesture of continuity on four threads: reweaving the urban void into the historical fabric, weaving memory between past and future, spatial weaving between interior and exterior, and, last but not least, functional weaving between production and exhibition.