Cuts as Pieces of Architecture

Abstract

Neglected and abandoned places in the contemporary city are typically understood as negative, problematic issues followed by a tendency of straight-forward architectural solutions. Considering such places as a result of accumulating city processes and conceptualizing them as ”cuts’’ in the urban and architectural tissue opens up an unforeseen potential to construct a design process based on the investigation of phenomena that leads to the awareness of different spatial perception and a more profound understanding of the context. The city centre of Bucharest provides a multitude of mesmerizing examples of such spaces where the theory of motion, play and desires merged with a fascination of parkour as a ‘derivious’ contemporary practise transgressing control and conventional reading of the city. Gradually, these ideas have led to a design of stacked structures with a multitude of height differences, smooth and rough surfaces, and freedom of multiple moving directions suggesting a challenging yet complex environment for learning and practising parkour. Simultaneously, the project manifests as an endless labyrinth of corridors, modest and monumental, warm and cold, reflective and absorbing, transparent, semi-enclosed or even dark spaces all intertwining with each other and inducing a ‘derivious’ spatial exploration. Modular assemblage and possibility for disassembling the project interprets the understanding of flexibility as a reuse and repurpose under different contexts. From a larger perspective, the project becomes a counterargument for the obsession with flatness, rigidity and over-control in the contemporary city and public buildings (places).