Architecture of Recovery - Addiction Treatment Center in Constanța

Authors’ Comment

This project begins with a simple belief: architecture can, and should, accommodate healing. Rather than asking how architecture can make people feel happy, the research asks a different question: how can architecture hold grief without trying to erase it? Healing is rarely about replacing pain with optimism. More often, it is about finding spaces capable of carrying vulnerability through all its stages.

The project proposes a long-term residential addiction treatment centre in Constanța, responding to the lack of specialised infrastructure for addiction recovery in Romania. The choice of programme is rooted in both a growing social need and the absence of a clearly defined architectural typology for long-term recovery.

The project is located on the existing site of Palazu Psychiatric Hospital, on the outskirts of Constanța, near Lake Siutghiol. The site was chosen not only for its existing medical infrastructure, but also for its potential to transform a place associated with institutional care into one associated with dignity, recovery and community. Its mature vegetation, sloping terrain and continuous visual relationship with the lake become fundamental elements of the architectural strategy.

The proposal begins at the scale of a masterplan, reorganising the existing psychiatric hospital while introducing the new addiction treatment centre closer to the lake. Existing mature vegetation is preserved wherever possible, while the buildings are positioned to establish continuous relationships with the landscape.

The treatment centre is organised as a gradual sequence from solitude towards community. A longitudinal axis connects a series of specialised buildings: residential units and dining spaces, psychiatric care, individual and group therapy, occupational therapy and sports facilities. This circulation route, following the natural slope of the site, begins as an underground passage and progressively emerges into daylight, transforming movement through the project into a metaphor for recovery.

The main entrance is also placed below ground, creating an initial sense of detachment from the outside world. Along the axis, sunken courtyards and contemplative spaces introduce moments of pause, silence and reflection. These spaces are conceived as places that allow grief to exist. In this sense, they function almost as secular places of prayer.

Materiality reinforces the emotional and spatial hierarchy of the project. Exposed concrete defines the underground spaces, expressing the weight and rawness of grief. The therapeutic buildings are articulated through heavy mineral plaster and deep openings, while wood is reserved for residential and communal spaces, introducing warmth, familiarity and a sense of home.

Ultimately, the project proposes recovery not as the absence of pain, but as the gradual reconstruction of a relationship-with oneself, with others and with the world. Architecture cannot heal on its own, but it can decide how human fragility is received: whether suffering is hidden or acknowledged, and whether vulnerability is isolated or accompanied. This project seeks to offer that accompaniment through space, material, landscape and time.