“Elisabeta Știrbey” coworking hub - the reactivation of Antim area through a public nucleus

Authors’ Comment

The Antim neighbourhood is a heritage area in a state of continuous degradation: centrally located in Bucharest, it remains paradoxically isolated — both physically and mentally — from the rest of the city, a victim of the trauma caused by the construction of the Civic Centre and the curtain of apartment blocks built in the 1980s. The chosen site includes one such degraded heritage building, the former Elisabeta Stirbey Institute, which was the first school for girls taught in Romanian.
In this context, we propose a public nucleus to act as a catalyst of reactivation for the area, composed of two complementary characters: the public-commercial area and the coworking area. The two characters are expressed in the architecture through two courtyards with different levels of privacy. They relate to the site, adapting through articulation elements and united by a grand stair atrium. In this way, an ensemble is created together with the Institute and the former teachers’ dwelling, highlighting the heritage while creating a new trigger for regeneration of the entire area.
The idea was to create a building that would complement the two existing buildings - the Institute and the former teachers’ dwelling - treated as “precious objects” to be highlighted rather than competed with. This relationship between old and new is conceived as an active one: the new intervention does not impose itself as an autonomous object-building, but instead acts as a mass that adapts and yields, shaping exterior space around it. The approach draws on references such as Alvaro Siza's Setúbal School of Education (1993) and Rosario Municipal Centre (1997), both of which employ interwoven masses to mediate between built form and open space. Conceptually, the new volume recedes into the background, allowing the heritage buildings to emerge as the true protagonists of the ensemble.