ADNBA- Mumuleanu 14, Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest Apartment building.
Bucharest Apartment building Mumuleanu Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest – The project densifies a fragmented neighborhood in central Bucharest. It works with local dwelling typologies in an attempt to preserve the flavor of small corners, courtyards, gardens, long narrow houses, which all used to fill the old center of Bucharest, and which are quickly disappearing under a fast and mostly uncontrolled development process.
The apartment building is located within a very heterogeneous urban fabric. It consists of 7 house-like volumes, successively placed along with the site, creating a community of 20 different apartments. The building’s vague outline opens less towards the street and more towards the deep and diffuse core, often hidden within Bucharest’s old streets. The elongated volume stretches from the back of the site and stays connected to the street through an access courtyard that runs along the site’s western boundary. On the plot’s eastern side, the long and irregular strip of land is split into a sequence of private gardens. DSM 2021 AWARDS
ADNBA- Mumuleanu 14, Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest Apartment building.
The entrances’ careful customization and the units’ double orientation are borrowed characteristics from the wagon house dwelling, a typical housing typology in Bucharest’s old central neighborhoods Thus, on the ground floor, duplex apartments are entered directly from the shared garden, like a series of “maisonettes”. On the second floor, an external gallery runs along with the whole building, as an elevated “alley” or garden, through which all apartments from the 2nd and 3rd+4th floor are accessed. URBAN PARK RETAIL DEVELOPMENT
Nowadays, Bucharest’s central areas face fast and somewhat chaotic densification. While we believe that density can, and (in many cases) must be seen as a form of sustainability, we also admit that the often fragile relationship between habitation within an old neighborhood and the increase of density can sometimes alter the place and reduce its existing qualities. Our project tries to mediate between different sizes and densities, in a central neighborhood with small streets, long, narrow plots, and a puzzle of old and new buildings, of all types and scales, which is also not far from the socialist intervention of a large boulevard and its “curtain” of tall apartment blocks.
The project thus works with a local typology (the long “wagon-house”) in an attempt to complete the neighborhood’s character by attaching and overlapping within one long and fragmented building several dwellings with distinct, private entrances, porches, gardens, loggias, or roof terraces. All units benefit from cross ventilation and open towards the more public Western side (front) garden and the more intimate Eastern side (back) garden.
Project Specs
The structure is made of concrete frames which carefully follow the shape of the seven volumes. Beams are used only transversally, within the walls between the apartments, allowing for higher openings on the long facades. The slabs are cantilevered towards the Western side, creating the intermediate spaces of the verandahs and open gallery. The slabs are tied together with thin steel columns, working as cross-ties and allowing for a deep façade, with a “portico” appearance. COLLECTIVE HOUSING
At the same time, the project has searched to reclaim the plaster as a simple yet beautiful façade material and technique. A widespread and rich technique in Bucharest’s older architecture, it has recently almost disappeared, in a period when the whole city is being arbitrarily clad in polystyrene, with standard mechanized finishing. The plaster was applied and finished manually all around the building – all minor errors were left visible precisely because they enhance the material’s beauty. We believe that such elements complete the whole design’s expressiveness and recover some of the “handcraft” techniques’ lost qualities.
Mumuleanu Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest:
Photography Credits: Laurian Ghinitoiu and Andrei Margulescu
Team Credits: Studio ADNBA
Authors
Andrei Șerbescu; Adrian Untaru; Bogdan Brădățeanu; Petra Bodea; Mihail Filipenco
Collaborators
Structural engineering: Popp si Asociatii