Reshaping the Villa – Complex Intervention in a 1930’s Structure

Abstract

The elegant 1930’s villa is situated in a central residential district in Timisoara, Romania. It is positioned back to the small complex of the archbishop’s residence and offices. The damaged modernist structure is to be rehabilitated and expanded to accommodate a Youth Center, connected by landscaping to the archbishop’s complex. Despite not being designed according to seismic codes, the structure showed no sign of degradation caused by seismic action. Therefore, the interventions objectives are: retrofitting the concrete structure, restoring the exteriors and interiors, expanding the house with an auditorium endowed with a stained-glass wall designed by a major artist and creating a connecting landform with the existing park. The retrofitting of the post and beam concrete structure had to leave intact the roofing system, the stairs and the window sills. The scarcity of documentation was compensated by the existence of an intact twin villa, offering information about finishing details. The new auditorium materializes as a “floating” prism, connected to the park by a landform; the stained-glass wall acts as a background for a small chapel in the park. Coordinating these fields is calling for a high degree of interdisciplinary work. An intervention scenario was formulated to offer a common platform in terms of intervention ethics. The continued monitoring of the site conduced to a “creative” adjustment of the project against the values discovered and (continuously) reinstalled. The project aims to restore the villa’s typology in a contemporary perspective, allowing a great flexibility of use for the complex.