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“Bucharest Archipelago, Toward an Ecological and Sustainable Contemporary City” is a collaborative academic research project with a highly relevant theme: How to make our cities more attractive and ecological places to live? Is it possible to imagine an alternative, more liveable and healthier architectural program for the city? The idea is to focus on urban environment, where design of living spaces, sustainability and architectural implications of Covid-19 conditions are indissociably related.

 

Cities have to change. The stopped present could be a good place from which to reflect on urban past and future. The project we propose is a design-reflection on how to bring landscape to the city. We think, the salvation of the urban future is not in expanding into the landscape, but in bringing nature into the city. We would propose the architectural division of large urban territories into smaller complex neighbourhoods, campuses, clusters, and monastery-like archipelago typologies. The goal of the project study is to redefine urban limits and to propose the neighbourhood borders in a new way.

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The essence of a city is about density and living closely together. There lies its beauty and its tragedy. In our study, we propose that the city should maintain the concept of density, closeness, and the juxtaposition of diverse lifestyles. We aim to continue densifying the city, but in a different way, with more intense green divisions and new urban pockets that, like islands, create specific urban archipelagos. We envision urbanization to be planned and designed in such a radical way that nature — including people, plants, animals, and associated organisms — can co-evolve within the city. New architectural typologies offering more attractive and healthier living options are imagined to be ecologically sustainable, featuring new urban parks, green pockets, village greens, and artificial lakes, even in unconventional places like roofs and disused railway tracks and roads. This approach offers a different scale of living, with light, air, smell, and spontaneous, unplanned situations. Buildings and places should be beautiful, yet still determined by these sensual moments.

 

Bucharest’s centre is a rich repository of diverse and interesting organization of urban life, shaped by specific socio-political and economic developments in the 19th and 20th centuries. Extrapolated from its original context, the city could become a global model, like Berlin, Oslo, Tokyo, and London, where dense green courtyard-islands will serve as speculative case studies. These studies will explore the new relationship between archipelago living and the surrounding metropolitan forces. Through a thorough study of the city, Bucharest’s islands and archipelago spaces could become a model for a new type of urbanity and new ways of dense living. Contrary to modernist extensions, they would promote alternative forms of connectivity through the precise demarcation of borders. Characterized by hard boundaries, limited access points, and checkpoints, island and archipelago organizations would create a “soft” spatial segregation taken to the extreme. The definition of borders instead of blurring the 205 borders would become an argument for the new urban forms, focusing on destinations, instead of modernist nomadism. This approach would allow the development of new housing communities and new interesting non-monofunctional typologies of living, like campus, monastery and hospital were in the past. While seemingly isolationist, these new typologies would foster forms of distanced connectivity and togetherness through the introduction of new urban elements, borders, pockets, and hard boundaries. This would imply the reinventing architectural language of the city, imagined as fragments, with nice, intelligent spaces, water and green environments, that bring nature into the city.

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