Film Screening Center at Assan’s Mill

Authors’ Comment

Against the backdrop of rapid urban transformation and the progressive loss of important fragments of the city’s built memory, industrial heritage raises questions about the relationship between preservation, reuse, and the need to accommodate new forms of use. Abandoned industrial complexes are not merely isolated architectural objects, but retain traces of activities, infrastructures, and relationships that have contributed to the development of the city. The project investigates how the conversion of such a complex can become a process of reactivating memory and reconnecting the site with the contemporary city.
Assan Mill is the starting point of the research. The former mill and silo, now detached from their original industrial role and from the infrastructure that once served them, are examined as fragments of a larger system. The disappearance of their original function has resulted not only in the degradation of the buildings, but also in the loss of their relationship with the surrounding urban fabric. In this context, the project proposes transforming the complex into a Film Screening Center, introducing a cultural program capable of developing a new relationship between heritage, public space, and community.

The research starts from the idea that the cinematic experience can extend beyond the limits of the screening room and become a tool for constructing an architectural journey. Film implies sequence, framing, contrast, darkness, and light, and these elements are translated into the organization of space. Visitors move through a succession of spaces characterized by different degrees of light, openness, and materiality, gradually discovering the existing buildings and the new interventions. Architecture is not perceived from a single viewpoint, but is constructed through movement and the continuous change of perspective.

At the urban scale, the project recovers the direction of the former railway lines that once connected the industrial complex to the city. The route is reinterpreted as a green pedestrian corridor starting from Circului Park and leading towards Assan Mill, transforming a disappeared infrastructure into a new public space. The route creates connections between the complex and the existing urban fabric, introducing places to pause, small squares, green areas, and spaces for gathering. The intervention therefore extends beyond the recovery of the buildings themselves, seeking to reactivate lost urban relationships.

The intervention in the existing buildings starts from preserving their industrial character and traces of time. The brickwork, openings, remaining structures, and incomplete character of the mill and silo are maintained as active elements of the project. The new interventions are conceived as reversible and demountable structures, predominantly made of wood and metal, allowing the distinction between existing and new to remain legible. The contemporary insertion does not seek to reconstruct a lost image, but to create a new layer capable of coexisting with the existing memory.

Inside the silo, this strategy is continued through the introduction of a “house within a house” structure. The functional organization draws on Louis Kahn’s research into the relationship between served and servant spaces, as well as his studies of fortified architecture. Circulation spaces, services, and secondary cores become elements that organize the experience and construct successive sequences between the main spaces. In this way, the new structure does not simply occupy the existing volume, but makes it perceptible through contrast and through the definition of new spatial relationships.

Light becomes one of the main instruments of the intervention, not only as a visual element, but as a means of constructing spatial perception. In Juhani Pallasmaa’s understanding of architectural experience, space is perceived through the participation of the whole body and through the relationship between light, material, atmosphere, and movement. This approach supports the project’s research, in which light is not exclusively functional, but also contributes to the orientation and rhythm of the journey. In the screening room, light is controlled and reduced towards darkness, while in the silo it is introduced selectively through skylights and zenithal openings. The relationship between natural and artificial light, between dark spaces and those filled with light, creates a sequence that echoes the logic of film. The ruin is therefore perceived differently from one space to another, while the existing material becomes the setting for a contemporary experience.

Through the conversion of Assan Mill into a cultural center, the project investigates the possibility of keeping industrial heritage active without compromising its identity. The mill and silo are not treated as static artifacts, but as structures capable of accommodating new uses and new forms of urban life. Architecture thus becomes a means of mediating between what the site was and what it can become, between industrial memory and contemporary experience.