Urban ruin - School of hertitage education and specialization

Authors’ Comment

Although physically present in the city's most prominent areas, urban ruins often remain marginalized within current architectural discourse, bypassed by new developments that favor insertions on vacant plots. In Bucharest, this issue assumes a specific typology: the "recent ruin," which emerges not from the passage of time, but from a deliberate act of destruction (strategic ruination). This reality is exacerbated by a major systemic deficiency: the scarcity of professionals trained to intervene and salvage these historical fragments. This diploma project addresses this twofold vulnerability - the compromised spatial fabric and the professional shortage - by intervening on the Carol Benisch House, a historic building of which only three walls have survived a partial demolition. The architectural solution proposes the volumetric restoration of the house alongside the integration of a restorative function: a postgraduate school for heritage specialization. The project conceptualizes the intervention as an intrinsic educational process: the ruin ceases to be merely an urban scar, becoming instead an open subject of study. Consequently, rehabilitating the building and training the specialists equipped to comprehend it become two facets of the same solution, aimed at revitalizing the central area and restoring a fragment of the city's lost identity.