Bucharest Architecture Annual Bucharest 2011 - Award of the President of the Branch: residential building - 34 Batiștei str. - arh. Lilian Captari

This building was modeled based on an existing PUD. The height and gross volumes were fixed by the theme. We tried to improve the solution by introducing a screen mimicking the interwar architecture towards Batiștei str. The ends and backs were treated differently, focusing on architecture that can provide interesting details at street profile level. On the ground floor, we tried to convince the clients to offer pedestrians a 3 m passage (on the ground it was only 1.5 m), so we set the building back by 1.5 m.

Many consider that it advanced the building, in reality the land under the building belongs to the beneficiary. This passageway together with the setbacks in the PUD gave us a lot of trouble with the building structure and we had to redesign in the DE phase, but this provided more interesting articulations - which we would not have designed if it were not for the problems on the site, which unexpectedly participated in the design process and which we believe contributed to the specificity of the project.