studioBASAR

Intermediary Bucharest

authors: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan

,Intermediary Bucharest’ represent the contribution of studioBASAR within the publication Atlantis Volume #25, July 2015, in the section Manifesto.

http://www.polistudelft.nl/category/atlantis/

,Intermediary Bucharest’ is an excerpt from an ongoing project of research and mapping of the intermediary condition found both within Bucharest’s public space, and in studioBASAR’s projects of public space practice.

INTERMEDIARY Bucharest
a small scale manifesto

In Bucharest you can take a bucket of fresh water from a well in front of your 10 stories high apartment building, you can buy used books from your neighbor’s car trunk in the parking lot or you can take the subway and visit a delta on a weekend. You can find these situations all around the city. After half our lives spent here we’ve become entangled in a love and hate relationship with this city and its people, and started to learn its lessons as architects.

From a long history of consecutive transitions, Bucharest carries the memory of these intermediary moments carved out in its urban spaces and practiced in the everyday habits of its people. This is the most important class that we attend to, the Intermediary Urbanism course, taught by the city itself.

So, speaking of manifestos in Bucharest comes as naturally as looking out the window. The manifesto is right there in front of your eyes. Training our way of looking by downgrading our architect’s sight, a new territory was revealed, characterized by its intermediary status rather than just fixed uses and solid volumes.

The intermediary quality of the urban spaces is found both in how the spaces are made but also in how the city’s functions are practiced. The boundaries and interstices of the urban fabric are working as valves for the city. These are rich territories where uncertainty reigns and where different programs and groups intersect and overlap.

Such an intermediary space can be at the same time a leftover terrain, a crowded parking space or an informal market, like the Fishermen’s Corner. But even the act of selling and buying is not just pure commerce; it’s a pretext for like-minded people to meet and socialize weekly. ‘Both’ rather than ‘either’ is the paradigm of these small scale manifestos for more flexible cities.

But these intermediary spaces and their added uses are threatened by extinction through privatization or exclusion, not only by the administration or investors, but also by the individual user’s actions. Parking on the sidewalk, fencing the green space in front of your flat or extending your ground floor apartment are expressions of the transformation of the public space into a resource for everybody to grab a piece of.

In the middle of this turmoil, we began to engage the city through micro-urbanism actions, a series of interventions, events, installations and experiments performed in the public space. Using minimum means and sometimes crossing the limits of legality, they were similar to most of the users’ actions, being opportunistic, subjective and basic, but aiming to keep the place open, inclusive, flexible and reversible.

Learning by doing was a valuable experience for us, and complete failures were part of the lesson. But there were also actions that led to the permanent transformation of the context in which the intervention was located, like The Letter Bench. Set on a linear threshold with uncertain ownership between an informal parking area and a small green space, the structure negotiated over time an emerging public space, proving also that small objects can make the city.

Fishermen’s Corner
learning from the intermediary

Location: at the intersection of Calea Moşilor and Paleologu street, Bucharest;

Typology: leftover terrain (until 2014);

Spatial Characteristics: roughly 45X25m with an extension of 5X25m; bordered by 3 streets and surrounded by blank walls on 2 sides; no pavement (until 2014);

History: result of the demolitions of the ‘80s when the Italiană street was aligned to meet Paleologu street; for the last 30-35 years it remained a leftover space, with no fence, no owner, no formal function; in 2014 a supermarket was built on it, with a parking lot in front;

Main function: until 2014 the land was used mainly as an informal parking place; ‘parking-men’ were controlling the access;

Added Use: occasionally used as an informal playground by the kids of nearby Moşilor street or as a dog walking area; every Friday morning, for many years, the space was partly occupied by men that used it as an ad-hoc market for fishing tools : small tables, blankets laid on the ground or even car opened trunks filled with lines, rods, hooks and baits; sometimes CD’s or other second-hand products could be seen also on the stalls;

Story: When asked why they were meeting here, one of the sellers said: “Since we were kicked out from Obor market we’ve been meeting here every Friday. I don’t know why, but here nobody ask us anything.”After the construction of the supermarket and the parking lot, the fishermen’s market moved 50 meters away, across the street, into the courtyard of Fishermen’s and Hunter’s Association.

The Letter Bench
experimenting with micro-urbanism

Location: on Verona Street, in front of Cărtureşti bookstore, Bucharest.

Typology: a cul-de-sac alley used for parking and access;

Spatial Characteristics: size of roughly 30X7m; bounded on one side by one a green space of 20X25m, by buildings on two sides and by the Verona street on 4th side;

History: until 2009 the alley was used as a parking place; during the Street Delivery #4 festival that ‘closes the street for cars and opens it for people’ we built a structure that had a 3 day permit; placed on the non-conflict threshold between the green space and the alley, wrapped onto an existing metal fence, the structure achieved a truce, leaving the cars to park and the people to sit at the same time; in 2010 the architect Şerban Sturdza installed across the structure 5 concrete benches that made the alley narrower and impossible for a car to park without blocking the alley; since then, the cobblestone pavement on the alley was replaced but the bench survived; during Street Delivery festival we repaired the bench every year and wrapped it in newspapers;

Main function: seating place for the bookstore’s visitors and for the inhabitants of the apartment block; meeting and chatting place for neighbors when taking their dogs out to the green area;

Added Use: after wrapping it in newspapers, other announcement, posters, tags were posted on it; shelter for homeless people that are using the structure as storage place and a more protected area of the bench as sleeping place; they are also using the bench interior for storing their belongings; sometimes used by informal street-vendors; occasionally used as playground, both in summer and in winter;

Story: When the city administration replaced the cobblestone pavement of the alley, the workers didn’t touch the structure, although it had no legal permit anymore. It was unclear to them if it belonged to the alley or to the green space, which are governed by different municipal departments. So, not to make things more complicated, they left the bench in place.