Argument

Architecture and urbanism structure space. Not because the natural environment has no structure of its own - and yet of a coherence no architect could ever hope to imagine - but in pursuit of the ceaselessly reinvented idea of the inhabited environment: useful, protective and, of course, meaningful.

A predictable and yet always unexpected by-product of anthropic spatial structuring interventions is the collateral emergence of unstructured spaces. Even if we admit that a possible definition of unstructured space is richer, allowing for nuanced and diverse hypostases, we can consider it here as resulting either as a residue of the project - such as the unnumbered and nameless places under viaducts - or as the result of the abandonment of structures once inhabited, but always in the vicinity of or following functional developments. This can mean any building, construction or installation intended for habitation in the broadest sense. In a desirable order, unstructured spaces appear to us as dysfunctions.

The reintegration of these discontinuities into the continuous fabric of inhabitation is therefore as much a natural concern of architecture and urban planning as the planning itself. And the inventiveness required to find a solution in each individual case often surpasses the day-to-day skill of the professional.

This is why an exercise in approaching unstructured spaces in the context of an uneven and playful, lucid tour of the horizon, without claiming to exhaust the subject, is an attempt to respond to the diversity of the nature and scope of the facets of the issue of unstructured spaces. The most appropriate formula seems to be that of a competition to address both how to pose the problem and how to solve it. Architects and urban planners were therefore invited to look for places that could be associated with the versatile concept of 'unstructured space', which they could then structure using the tools of architecture and urbanism. As a result, a significant part of the contributions to the dossier of this issue of "Arhitectura" consists of six case studies - consisting of site analysis and proposed solutions - selected from the twelve projects received by the editorial office following a call for projects.

It is worth noting the diversity of the stages of approach: the contributions published include a school project, a prize-winning architectural competition project and a project at an advanced stage of completion. This is significant as it indicates that there is a concern with the issue of unstructured spaces at all levels of the profession. The variety of projects, which is inherent to the theme and a direct consequence of the different sites dealt with, suggests, however, that the authors have a common orientation towards intra-urban cases, showing an interest in reinventing a city environment with a pre-machinist reference, but tailored to post-industrial societies. And the common feature of all six case studies is the return to a human scale, the attention paid to the immediate vicinity, to the not only visual but also tactile or kinaesthetic relationships between the spatial elements and the person who walks through ^them1. There is therefore a - welcome - return of the urban project towards the citizen. It is an attempt to reinvent the symbiosis between urbs and civitas, which has been in a state of continual disequilibrium ever since the tools we have invented tend to usurp our place in the city.

Three of the projects in the thematic dossier deal with water banks: Someș in Satu Mare, Mureș in Ditrău and Dâmbovița in Bucharest. The interventions, differentiated not only by the specific features of each site, but also by the personality of the respective authors - Dana Cosma, Köllő Miklós and, respectively, the team Bianca Gioadă, Elena Marcu-Ștefănescu, Andrei Ștefănescu, guided by arch. Marius Velicu - share the option for recreational functions arranged in a natural-urban environment dominated by the presence of the river. In the case of Bucharest, the planning effort is also aimed at functional integration with the wider neighborhood - the Politehnica University Campus and the Regie student residences. The interest in reformulating the relationship between the city and the water, replacing the traditional economic-productive aspect with the contemplative-recreational one is also noteworthy because it synchronizes our concerns in this field with similar ones in countries that industrialized and deindustrialized before Romania.

The project entitled "[Re]Fabricăm orașul - trecutul ca viitor" (Re]Fabricating the city - the past as future), by the team formed by Corina Cosmescu, Ana Maria Negru, Alexandra Tudor, Elena Bărbuș, Carmen Matiz, Szőke Anikó, is about the Independența industrial site in Sibiu. According to the authors, the 9-hectare architectural derelict, stranded on the outskirts of the historic city, but now at the heart of the urban fabric, is proposed to be ingeniously rehabilitated with minimal interventions to the infrastructure, to start with, leaving the initiative of the citizens to continue the work of recovering the industrial heritage over time.

The next two projects exemplify situations in which urban spaces have come to be deconstructed by contagion, as a result of the abandonment of buildings. Thus, Florina Pop's proposal for the revitalization of the Popular cinema hall is different from those aimed at unbuilt or residual spaces, insofar as it restructures a historic urban environment - After the Walls - in Brasov. The proposed architectural-restoration intervention does not stop at the building, but contextually extends to the neighborhood which, enhanced, contributes to the value of the rehabilitated building. Finally, on the same line, but in a very different urban environment, is the project of Cătăline Vărzaru, which aims to rehabilitate and refunctionalize the House of Science and Technology for Youth in Giurgiu. Here again, the intervention encompasses the spaces beyond the building, thus also restructuring the "urban defect" generated by the abandonment of the building.

Following on from the projects in the thematic dossier, Ioana Tudora's essay (the title of which could paraphrase Hamlet's dilemma) articulates the position of the professional-looker: the keen observation of the architect and landscape architect is doubled by the emotional involvement of the bucurean who knows and loves - precisely because of its "lack of structure" - the city, as only someone born and raised in it can. The author's approach is as personal as it is appropriate for any architect and any city-dweller eager to understand the city. The two congruent stages - critical and affective - of her approach to the urban space support a message that is precise and, at the same time, subjective, enlightening and suggestive.

Another hypostasis of this duality of the problematic of destructured spaces, which mirrors the eternal dynamics of the construction of anthropic space, is particularized in Günter Schlusche's article on the Berlin Wall. It is followed by an evocation by Alexandru Damian of the unusual Belgrade Bombing Museum. The dossier is concluded by an account by Mirel Drăgan of the workshop of Timisoara student-architects held in Sebeș in 2015, which aimed to study the fortifications here and, in the medium term, to find ways in which local communities can be drawn into the revalorization, maintenance and, above all, the re-location of forgotten urban spaces.

Outside the dossier, but related to its thematic, Petru Mortu's study on Băneasa Railway Station presents a special case, in which a valuable and functional building tends to lose any urban interest because of the destructive interventions in its immediate neighborhood.

The magazine 'Arhitectura', in its issue dedicated to the issue of destructured spaces, brings to the forefront one of the most topical themes. At the same time, and somewhat unexpectedly, by exalting marginality, i.e. by turning the perspective from the periphery to the centre, it manages to problematize urbanity and urbanism in a novel way.

NOTE

1. We find in them a kind of approach such as that theorized and successfully practiced by Raoul Bunschoten, materialized in numerous studies carried out in team with his students and described, for example, in Urban Flotsam. Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 2001.