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Radu Tîrcă and Ștefania Hîrleață are students at University of Architecture and Urbanism 'Ion Mincu', Bucharest. At present, they lead their theoretical research on the subject of thermal towns and diploma projects in Govora Baths under the guidance of Stefan Simion, Irina Tulbure and Ilinca Paun Constantinescu. As students, they won second prize and best student project in a BeeBreeders international architecture competition - Mango Vynil Hub, third prize in a Zeppelin national competition - Prototip pentru comunitate, as well as other mentions in other competitions.
Bucharest’s Urban Gardens
a t e l i e r M a z z o c c h i o o
In a slow evolution throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the urban blocks of Bucharest have acquired particular, unexpected forms and features, in close complicity with the winding streets that delineate them and the maidans that gathered the city’s life around them. The depth of the plots derives from their placement within the urban block, a depth often visible from the street thanks to the houses that develop lengthwise and the gardens that accompany them. To the face perceived from the street, there is often an added hidden part of the city, which you discover when you move away from the street, approaching the core of the urban block. The encounter of these back lots produces a special place in the city, with a particular atmosphere: the sound of the street becomes distant, the summer temperature is more bearable here, the urban scale is replaced by that of the trees and plants, and by the fragmentation that is more typical of life in the middle of nature than of the fronts and alignments of the city.
The present project speculatively proposes imagining the opening of these hidden places to the city, transforming them into common gardens accessible to the entire neighborhood.
The aim is to make the most of the contemporary city by rediscovering the latent qualities of its internal urban structure, rather than through the expansion and occupation of its peripheral territories. These urban block cores can allow for nuanced densification in terms of producing new built spaces, but also in the spirit of multiple uses of the same territory: public and common, as a place to retreat where you can read a book, as an alternative work space, or as a meeting place.
This network of potential common gardens could constitute a new impetus in the contemporary initiative to re-naturalize the city, in an attempt to transform it into a healthier, more ecological, more livable environment. These urban gardens could be proposed as a new family of proximity urban spaces, on a friendlier scale, suitable for the individual and the immediate community. Ultimately, these apparently hidden gardens could take the form of a new urban program for Bucharest.