FRUMENTUM – from production to culture. Conversion of the “Marea Moară Română – Ștefan Barbu Drugă” into a Multidisciplinary Cultural Centre, Craiova

Authors’ Comment

There are places that never truly disappear. They remain there, woven into the fabric of the city, silent and inaccessible, carrying within their walls a memory that no one reads anymore. The "Marea Moară Română – Ștefan Barbu Drugă" in Craiova is one such place. This project seeks to transform the industrial ensemble into a multidisciplinary cultural centre capable of reactivating the relationship between memory, community, and urban space.

The main intention is to demonstrate that abandoned industrial heritage does not represent a closed chapter of history, but an active resource for the contemporary development of the city. The project began with a simple question: what happened inside the mill? Grain followed a precise circuit, built on verticality, continuous flow, and progressive purification. This logic became the conceptual foundation of the entire intervention.

The concept — Frumentum, useful yield — reinterprets the technological flow of the mill. Where it once transformed grain into physical nourishment, the new cultural centre transforms knowledge, creativity, and memory into a shared resource for the community.

The intervention preserves and enhances the industrial identity of the ensemble through adaptive reuse, introducing a contemporary cylindrical extension inspired by the logic and symbolism of the grain silo — a volume that does not compete with the mill, but enters into dialogue with it, completing the ensemble without diminishing its presence. Together, the two silos — the one integrated within the mill and the new one — create a journey between darkness and light, between labyrinth and ascent, between memory and becoming.

The cultural programme responds to the concrete needs of the area: a library and coworking spaces for students from the adjacent university campus, workshops for local artists, exhibition spaces and a mill museum for visitors, a multifunctional hall for events, and public outdoor spaces for the local community.

Exposed brick, concrete, perforated white metal sheet, and steel structures build a clear dialogue between old and new, while natural light, verticality, and the movement of the user become instruments of the spatial experience.

Barbu Drugă Mill is thus transformed from a place of physical nourishment into a place of intellectual nourishment — from a space suspended between memory and abandonment into a new living layer of the city. Frumentum continues the original meaning of the building, carrying it forward into the present, so that the memory of this place remains alive and reminds us that "There was once a mill here."