A block with six courtyards
Team: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan
Civil engineer: Lucian Stanciu, Mihai Pavel (Altfel Construct)
Mechanical engineer: Florentina Radu, Mirela Neculai, Alexandru Damian
Constructor: Blue Spot
Location: Mărăşeşti street nr. 270, Ploieşti
Client: Baupartner
Total surface: 571 sqm
Period: 2009-2013
Bucharest Architecture Annual / 2014 - Housing category - Nomination.
In a hybrid territory at the edge of a city (Ploieşti), several rows of blocks of flats and an array of houses are facing each other along an unfinished boulevard. Urban planning was suddenly stopped, leaving behind an improbable juxtaposition of situations cohabitating a narrow territory: collective housing and houses with courtyards, vegetable gardens and small stores, metal garages and hencoops. Gradually, the city fabric had consolidated into a hybrid world, where the typologies of both constructions and living practices tend to mix by borrowing one from another.
The building engages the fragmentary condition of the city fabric like a collage of local practices, and is recessed on the footprint of the unfinished boulevard, dividing the long and narrow plot into a hidden courtyard in the back and an open one towards the street.
On one side of the building, a series of deep openings are organizing the interior of each level around ‘interior courtyards’. The geometry and the usages between these courtyards and the interior spaces refer to the ambiguous condition of the context - partially planned, partially vernacular - borrowing from its proximity the fragmentary expression enriched by extensions or ad-hoc makeshifts. These intermediary spaces connects the new housing with the diverse neighborhood’s environment, like the closed balconies of the flats across the street, the orchard trees and poultries from the nearby yards, the rusted metal rockets of the military unit’s enclosure or the sounds of the night trains.
Ground floor plan
Current floor plan
Detail current floor
Section
South Facade
West Facade
