Between layers. The adaptive reuse of the Mirea Miclescu House: a framework for artistic practices and processes

Authors’ Comment

Through my diploma project, I propose the reactivation of the Mirea Miclescu House, a Neo-Romanian monument designed by Ion Mincu, which is currently in an advanced state of deterioration and withdrawn from the public life of the city. The choice of the site stems from the contradiction between the visibility of the house and its impossibility of being used, but above all from an understanding of its suspended presence: a house that remains recognizable within the city’s memory, yet has been removed from the circuit of public life and separated from its own cultural potential and from the intensity it once possessed.
The intervention seeks to restore the relationship between the house, the garden and, implicitly, the city, starting from the artistic biography of the place and its position along Kiseleff Avenue. The proposed programme, dedicated to artistic practices and processes, continues this memory through spaces for research, work, exhibition and encounters with the public.
I believe that new architecture developed in the proximity of a monument must leave room for the historic building and respect its presence. For this reason, the proposal does not seek to compete with the house or reproduce its architectural language. Most of the intervention is placed underground and connects to the existing house at this level, allowing the monument to remain the primary landmark of the ensemble.
At ground level, several volumes with distinct functions emerge: the main entrance, a stepped seating area, a café and a second vertical circulation core associated with a small exhibition space. Their positioning is carefully related both to the monument and to the garden. The main volume of the intervention is a glazed, semi-transparent pavilion positioned towards the rear of the plot. It echoes the scale of the historic house and the profile of its pitched roof, translating the domestic character of the built fabric into a contemporary expression. The new volume establishes a carefully calibrated relationship with the historic house without claiming the foreground.
A contemporary intervention in heritage becomes legitimate when it is both lucid and sensitive: lucid in relation to history, materiality and the limits of restoration, and sensitive to the body, memory and the rhythm of the place. To preserve a house means, beyond conserving its physical existence, to restore a place’s capacity to be lived in and recognized once again as part of the city.
In conclusion, the architectural expression of the reactivation lies in a carefully calibrated density of experience. The house remains the affective and historical centre of the ensemble, the new layer supports its return to public life, while the garden mediates between the two. The continuity of the place depends on the project’s ability to reconstruct an experience lived through the body and preserved in memory, beyond the mere conservation of its image. In this form, reactivation moves beyond the simple rescue of a building and instead concerns the restoration of the conditions through which a once-living space can once again become a place where memory is renewed.