Working from the inside out Occidentului Street is a typical street for the central area of Bucharest, with isolated villas in the middle of the yard, wagon-houses, buildings from the interwar period and insertions from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The gerenal volume is decomposed through several movements and set-backs into a row of smaller houses with different heights that sequence the perception of the building and nuances the relationship to the neighbouring houses and the fragmentary surroundings.
The intervention proposes a community of 20 apartments and a commercial unit on the wide but relatively shallow plot. All units are transversal / double oriented and organized on split-levels. Instead of typical stacked general floors, here the floors and ceilings move and generate a series of staggered floors, level differences and variations in height and depth – lending the apartments something of the vertical dimension of dwelling.
The open facades reflect the varied interior life of the building and seeks a certain kind of ‘transparency’; the apartment arrangement both defines and is defined by the structural order of the building and clearly reveals itself outwards.
